Bug#509935: decide whether Uploaders is parsed per RFC 5322
On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 06:24:46PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Thank you for the concrete wording proposal!
>
> Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> writes:
>
> > While I think it would be fine to have a comprehensive and accurate
> > specification, something like this could be an easy improvement.
> >
> > By omitting mention of RFC 822, the mandate for UTF-8 in the control
> > file should obviate RFC 2047 encoding.
> >
> > Despite underspecifying things, I doubt there will be anyone trying
> > to use email addresses of the wrong form.
> >
> > diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
> > index 7de382d..080229c 100644
> > --- a/policy.sgml
> > +++ b/policy.sgml
> > @@ -2582,17 +2582,14 @@ Package: libc6
> > <p>
> > The package maintainer's name and email address. The name
> > should come first, then the email address inside angle
> > - brackets <tt><></tt> (in RFC822 format).
> > + brackets <tt><></tt>.
> > </p>
>
> We could say that the e-mail address must be an RFC 5322 addr-spec without
> obs-* rules so that we don't lose the restriction on what the e-mail
> address should be like.
>
> I wonder if we should also prohibit domain-literal. We allow it now, but
> there are no uses of it in the archive.
>
> > <p>
> > - 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).
> > + If the maintainer's name contains a full stop or a comma,
> > + the entire name must either be surrounded by quotation marks
> > + or put within round brackets and moved it to the end
> > + (thus bringing the email address forward).
> > </p>
> > </sect1>
>
> We should say explicitly that the quotation marks are not part of the
> maintainer's name. Should we say something about whether the maintainer
> name can be quoted even if it doesn't contain a comma?
>
> I'd like to maintain the current allowance for not quoting the maintainer
> name even if it contains a full stop, despite the RFC 5322 requirement to
> quote addresses that contain full stops. Among other things, people who
> use initials in their maintainer names don't currently do the quoting and
> I don't really want to make those packages buggy.
>
> I think we can safely prohibit for our purposes the email@address (Name)
> form. There are no occurrances of it in the archive.
>
> Whatever we say here we should probably also say in section 4.4 (the
> changelog specification). Maintainers should use the same form of the
> name and be able to do the same quoting in both places.
While I can only agree on the technical ground of this proposal, I have
quite a number of scripts (including popcon) that depend on the ability
to extract the maintainer name from the Maintainer/Uploaders field. I suspect
others developers and debian-qa might have others.
Adding quotes around the maintainer name break the interface somehow.
Using the full Maintainer field is often problematic because:
1) we might not want to display the email address.
2) we might want to merge entries from the same maintainer using
different email adresses for different packages. (popcon go farther
and check for different capitalization).
So I would suggest we keep the format 'Name <email>' and forbid dot and
commas. Developers that need them could use UTF-8 variants of those.
Alternatively, debian-policy could spell out the correct regexp to
extract the Maintainer name, but there will be a lot of scripts to
update.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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