Bug#509935: decide whether Uploaders is parsed per RFC 5322
Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr> writes:
> 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.
Well, I really don't want to prohibit dots. We allow dots now and they
don't pose any problems, other than the note in Policy that you need to
put quotes around the name if you use it in an e-mail To: field (which
presumably all of our software already deals with).
Your point about not wanting to change software that parses the name is
well-taken. I think, though, that if we say that you may only put
double-quotes around the name if there is a comma in the name and
otherwise the quotes should be omitted, that would minimize the problem.
Only a handful of existing maintainers would be affected (namely those
maintainers who are having trouble right now), so updating software
wouldn't be that urgent.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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