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format of Maintainer: field



following the discussion about UTF-8 encoding of Packages file,
I took a look at Packages and noticed that some Maintainer: fields
are _not_ in RFC-822 -like e-mail format.
So I wanted to find out what format is prescribed, but was not able
to find anything (maybe I just looked in the wrong places), only
new maintainers' guide says: 
     Line 4 is the name and email address of the maintainer.
and in debian policy:
     The maintainer must be specified in the `Maintainer' control field
     with their correct[1] name and a working email address.

[1] if I were nasty I would point out that names with stripped diacritics
    or transliterated from non-latin scripts are not correct, and thus
    against debian policy, but I am not :-)

And that's all, nothing about how the name and email is written there,
if it should be in a machine parseable format, or just visually clear
what is name and what is email...

OTOH, debian/changelog has specified form:
           -- <maintainer name> <<email address>>  <date>
so definitely not in general RFC822 format


Is form of Maintainer: field really unspecified?
And if so, should it be tightened more strictly?

Please do not connect this issue with the discussion about
default encoding of Packages file, this is a separate problem.
(though it affects the first one)

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