One way to merge in these changes is to pull them into a local branch for review, verifying the changes and then merge to back to master.

# Check out a new branch for integration
git checkout -b merge-requests/1182

# Fetch the merge request into this branch
git pull \
  git://gitorious.org/statusnet/mainline.git \
  refs/merge-requests/1182

# Show the commits, assess they are okay
git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit 0.8.x..merge-requests/1182

# To apply the changes to your branch:
git checkout 0.8.x
git merge merge-requests/1182
git push origin 0.8.x