From: Linus Torvalds Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:23:23 GMT Subject: Re: email address handling Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20080801145804.85041bbd.akpm@linux-foundation.org> 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. 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 should be quoted if they were email addresses. That would be very irritating. 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 etc, where it sure as heck isn't a rfc2822-compliant email address. 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. You could cut-and-paste just the stuff inside the angle branckets, though. That should work. Linus