Michael Stone <mst...@debian.org> writes: > Yes, it would probably be best to specify a restricted subset of > RFC822. Luckily most of the work for that was done in RFC2822, and it > would probably be sufficient to specify RFC2822 "mailbox" syntax with no > "obsolete" elements. Multiple mailboxes can be listed with comma > delimiters. Then if someone wants to get really creative with their > comments and routing syntax, just file a bug.
I'd be more comfortable with this (well, RFC 5322 at this point), since this removes a lot of the insanity. However, note that this is incompatible with existing Maintainer fields: RFC 5322 requires that . be quoted. So any Maintainer field containing an unquoted period would have to change. RFC 5322 also prohibits non-ASCII characters, which would have to be encoded in RFC 2047 encoding. I have some experience with RFC 2822 and its various related and successor standards as part of a lot of Usenet standardization work, and I think people underestimate just how complicated those standards are and how different this is from our current practice. This is me waving red flags and saying "here there be dragons, you may not want to go down this path." -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>