Bug#509935: decide whether Uploaders is parsed per RFC 5322

[Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es>]

* Russ Allbery [Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:10:55 -0800]:

> 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).

I think dots should be allowed, yes, and be allowed unquoted.

> 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.

I think we should *consider* do without commas at all, if losing them is
something we could live with. I realize that would be annoying for
people that have a comma in their name, so I'm not right away saying we
should forbid them. But I really think we should consider it, because
even if commas have to be quoted, you've already lost the ability to
parse the Uploaders field with split /\s*,\s*/, which I think would be a
loss, since that works for all other fields.

(Oh, and if we do without commas, we should do without quoting as well
IMHO.)

Just my 2¢,

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
- Are you sure we're good?
- Always.
                -- Rory and Lorelai