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

[Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>]

* Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>, 2008-12-27, 12:27:
> Policy currently says the following about the Maintainer field, which
> applies by reference to the Uploaders field:
>
>    The package maintainer's name and email address. The name should come
>    first, then the email address inside angle brackets <> (in RFC822
>    format).
>
>    If the maintainer's name contains a full stop then the whole field
>    will not work directly as an email address due to a misfeature in the
>    syntax specified in RFC822; a program using this field as an address
>    must check for this and correct the problem if necessary (for example
>    by putting the name in round brackets and moving it to the end, and
>    bringing the email address forward).
>
> Most software has taken this to mean that the e-mail address should be
> in RFC822 format, not that the whole field should be.
>
> This is primarily posing a problem for people who have commas in their
> name.  The main example to date is Adam C. Powell, IV, but it can happen
> with various other name qualifiers and honorifics.

I propose the following simple solution to this bug:
- Let's forget about RFC 822/5322 compatibility, as it would introduce 
only needless complexity.
- Let's allow any punctuation characters in maintainer names and e-mail 
addresses *except* "<" and ">".

This way comma is completely disambiguated: it splits the field if and 
only it's preceded by the ">" character. I.e. you can use the following 
Perl regex to split the field: /\>\K\s*,\s*/.

One can easily check that this method does the right thing for parsing 
Uploaders fields of the existing packages: you could e.g. try this on 
ries:
$ zcat /srv/ftp.debian.org/mirror/dists/*/*/source/Sources.gz | grep-dctrl -ns Maintainer,Uploaders -e '' | perl -pe 's/\>\K\s*,\s*/\n/g' | sort -u

Incidentally, this is (almost) the same method dak uses to split 
Uploaders:

$ grep -r uploaders.*split daklib/
daklib/dbconn.py:        for up in u.pkg.dsc["uploaders"].replace(">, ", ">\t").split("\t"):

> Currently, the only way to express such a name that works with our 
> existing tools is to drop the comma, since several programs blindly 
> split on commas when parsing the field.

Let's fix them, then. :) I volunteer to fix lintian and dd-list. Do you 
know any other tools that parse Uploaders?

--
Jakub Wilk