Re: Bug#401452: Standardize syntax of the name in the Maintainer control field

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Fri, 2025-06-13 at 19:12:54 +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> Do you have a list of all tools and services that assume that Maintainer is a
> single email address ? Before that, I consider any changes to be dangerous.

Yes, changing this before every major parser has been updated, or at
least dpkg has been warning or erroring out on expected malformed
inputs seems like a recipe for disaster.

I had started looking at this some months ago due to #1089648, and
my last modifications from last month were something like:

  https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/commit/?h=next/normalize-maint&id=16cbd3183d6f3598f774a25b9c275faed4324732

I cannot recall now whether I did throw the archive Sources against it
though. And as mentioned on the commit message I'll probably refactor
that into its own class, but that would be in theory the way I see going
forward if that does not cause fallout (or at least not unexpected one).

If there's work done to change the current semantics, then I'd be open
in the future to changing what dpkg might accept (after a planned
transition, etc).

Thanks,
Guillem