Bug#485705: lintian: doesn't properly detect comma in control file email address quoted strings
Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct@debian.org> writes:
> Please read again. 5.6.3, which you quoted, refers to the Maintainer
> tag specified in 5.6.2, which in turn specifies RFC822 format, which
> permits quoted strings, including commas.
Kind of. What it says is:
The package maintainer's name and email address. The name should come
first, then the email address inside angle brackets <> (in RFC822
format).
Most software has interpreted this as saying that the e-mail address is in
RFC 822 format rather than the whole field, particularly given the next
paragraph which clearly implies that the Maintainer field actually allows
values that RFC 822 doesn't.
If the maintainer's name contains a full stop then the whole field
will not work directly as an email address due to a misfeature in the
syntax specified in RFC822; a program using this field as an address
must check for this and correct the problem if necessary (for example
by putting the name in round brackets and moving it to the end, and
bringing the email address forward).
Like Frank, I actually agree with you, but I think Policy should be
changed first and we should get some consensus that everything else, such
as dak, is also going to be changed. Adding an RFC 2822 parser is, I
think, the right move, but that's a surprisingly complex piece of software
and I want to make sure we have a project consensus that we're really
going to require that.
There are related problems, too -- for example, if we're comparing
maintainers, should we convert them to a canonical form? You mentioned
that in your original message (talking about removing quotes), but there
are a bunch of other things that one could potentially do around removing
comments, handling backslashes, RFC 2047 encoding, and so forth, and to
make matters worse, RFC 2822 doesn't specify a canonicalization.
> I see. Does this mean that lintian is consistent with the uploading
> framework, and I will have trouble uploading?
I haven't confirmed that to be the case, but I'm suspicious that it is.
It turns out that the uploading software itself probably doesn't care that
much for you since you're a DD, but for instance if you were a Debian
Maintainer, it's not clear that it would recognize that you're in
Uploaders if you include the comma in your name.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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