Re: email address handling

From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 1, 2008, 22:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20080801154137.29c96609.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0808011507430.6819@nehalem.linux-foundation.org>

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 15:23:23 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

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> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > I preserve the quotes (when present) in signoffs for this exact reason.
> 
> You must be one of the few ones.

Not the only one. See d67d1c7bf948341fd8678c8e337ec27f4b46b206, 3bf2e77453a87c22eb57ed4926760ac131c84459, ...

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> According to the RFC's, you should quote 
> pretty much any punctuation mark, including "." itself. Which means that 
> things like 
> 
> 	Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
> 
> should be quoted if they were email addresses.
> 
> That would be very irritating.

Yeah, it's ugly as sin. But it has usability benefits. Few people actually need this treatment.

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> It's even _more_ irritating for things like D'Souza (or Giuseppe D'Eliseo 
> to take a real example from the kernel).  For David, we could just not use 
> the "S." - for others, the special characters are very much part of the 
> name. It would also be very irritating for important messages like
> 
> 	Signed-off-by: Linus "I'm a moron" Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
> 
> etc, where it sure as heck isn't a rfc2822-compliant email address.

It might be.  Look at this guy:

From: Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>

Who later did an edit and became

From: "Josef 'Jeff' Sipek" <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>

> So the thing is, "strict email format" is just very annoying. Git does 
> know how to do (well, it _should_) it for "git send-email", but making the 
> human-readable output ugly just because somebody might want to 
> cut-and-paste it sounds really sad.

It didn't make human-readable output ugly. It was already ugly and it just left it alone so it was still usable.

> You could cut-and-paste just the stuff inside the angle branckets, though. 
> That should work.

Sure.  I like to include people's names though.

Perhaps a suitable solution to all this would be to teach more things to use .mailmap transformations and to update that file more.

otoh, if people really want to present themselves to the world in a name-reversed, comma-stuffed, quote-wrapped form then that was their choice..