Re: problems in gjots2 and Debian
The Wanderer writes ("Re: problems in gjots2 and Debian"):
> On 2018-04-18 at 05:55, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> > But that didn't happen, unless you put different meaning into
> > Maintainer and Uploaders.
>
> If you don't assign different meanings to "Maintainer:" and
> "Uploaders:", what's the point in both fields existing?
A very long time ago I foolishly wrote down that the payload of the
Maintainer field might only contain one name and address. (I wrote
that the Maintainer field was in RFC822 recipient field syntax.)
Some people foolishly and noncompliantly uploaded packages where the
"phrase" part of their name contained a comma.
Defensive tooling which would detect or reject syntactically invalid
packages was not yet written then.
Instead, tools grew to tolerate commas here rather than treat them as
separators (because they would mishandle the erroneous packages).
When people decided that multiple maintainers were a good idea they
invented a new field name Uploaders, because changing all the existing
tools' understanding of Maintainer was too much work (politically and
technically). We have been teaching all tools about Uploaders since.
Nowadays this mess is entangled with the arguments about whether
maintainership data ought to be primarily recorded in the source
package at all.
No-one has managed to get consensus to fix it.
Ian.
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