Ben Finney wrote:
If machine-parsing the copyright file is desired, I suggest someone draft up some kind of control-field format or similar to aid parsing. Attempting to machine-extract useful info consistently from copyright files across the archive at the moment is surely going to be a very error prone task.That is, so that the information can be extracted automatically and presented by a program in various contexts, rather than having the *only* way to get at the information be to read the debian/copyright file in its entirety.
Until this is done, it would seem a bit unfair to impose restrictions on the way people format the file, such as requiring un-munged email addresses (or even worse, formally specifying the munging method, although thankfully nobody has suggested that yet ;))
-- Jon Dowland