Re: Comma in Maintainer field

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Simon McVittie writes ("Re: Comma in Maintainer field"):
> Perhaps the designers of dpkg intended the Maintainer and each
> comma-separated Uploader to be an RFC 822 "mailbox",

That is indeed what I remember intending.  But evidently it's not what
I wrote.  I dug out my copy of the source code to dpkg 1.3.0, from
July 1996, and the language in its programmer.sgml is identical to
that in current policy.

> But Policy doesn't
> actually *say* they are, and neither do the format man pages; so it
> would seem to be a valid interpretation that a package with
> 
>     Uploaders: "William H. Gates, III" <...>, Steve Ballmer <...>
> 
> has *three* uploaders of which the first is syntactically invalid, namely:

I think nowadays we should specify that this field, and Uploaders, are
in RF822 recipient field syntax.  We can expect any program which
wants to split it into separate recipients to have a full-on email
header parser.  (In 1996 this was a much more difficult prescription.)

The db searches in this thread show that in practice the existing
tools are lax enough, and entries with commas in rare enough and often
enough already noncompliant, that this change can be brought in
without too much pain.

Ian.

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Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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