* Russ Allbery [Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:10:55 -0800]:
> Bill Allombert <bill.allomb...@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
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