I really like seeing the <> around URLs in a text format; I hate it, but we've already concluded we're doing it, so fine :).
I've never had trouble understanding whether a trailing period in text is part of the url (it isn't), and the simple software I use (browse-url-at-point, basically) doesn't either. I'm undecided about whether we should use <> around the email address, or just the URLs So far we seem to be concluding no <> around email addresses. Unless there are strenous objections to that, let's go with that. (but a third option, using "<mailto:" and ">" as a form of URL, doesn't look as nice to me as the first two). Agreed. What will it take to get these modifications back upstream, so that everyone can benefit from a new release of help2man? I pinged Brendan (help2man maintainer, bod at debian) fairly recently about making a new release (GPLv3 etc.), and he kinda sorta said he would. So this could be an opportune time to send him changes.