On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 12:36:56PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Adeodato Simó <d...@net.com.org.es> writes: > > > 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.) > > It would certainly make it easier for software. > > I have to admit to a personal bias (speaking as someone who goes by his > middle name rather than his first name) in favor of fixing software to > accurately recognize people's names rather than the other way around. I > personally find software that refuses to recognize my name the way that I > spell it to be quite obnoxious, so I'm sympathetic to people who have > commas in their name. But yes, allowing commas, even quoted, does > complicate Uploaders parsing quite a bit over the current simple state.
In any case, if commas are allowed, policy should spellout the correct regexp to parse the Uploaders field. > Bill mentioned the possibility of a Unicode comma other than the ASCII > comma. Does such a thing exist? It's kind of a hack, but it's also an > interesting compromise. I'm not sure why there would be such a thing, > though, given that there's a perfectly good comma in the ASCII range and > Unicode normally doesn't duplicate code points to no purpose. I have the exact opposite experience with unicode :) U+FF0C FULLWIDTH COMMA should do the trick. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
