Re: email address handling

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 15:39:37 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> Btw, the real issue here is
> 
>  - why do you want to make things uglier and make up stupid rules that are 
>    irrelevant to git, just for something that you admit you hadn't ever 
>    even _noticed_ until now, and now that you know about it it's not even 
>    a problem any more?

None of that is correct.

The real issue here is:

 - Why do you want to take usable RFC-compliant email addresses and
   mangle them in a manner which still doesn't match the person's
   actual name and which makes unsuspecting users of git potentially
   lose important email communications?

Ain't framing great?

> especially as
> 
>  - we know people won't do the quoting _anyway_, since we actually have 
>    tons of examples of that in the kernel as-is. 
> 
> Quoting should be for _tools_, not for people. And even if we did it, we 
> probably wouldn't be fully rfc2822-compliant anyway, because anybody sane 
> would decide to not quote '@' and '.', rigth?
> 
> Because those don't actually really have special meaning (yeah, they are 
> "special" characters in rfc-2822, but nobody cares, and the MUA can do it 
> for us, no)?
> 
> So now we'd actually not really be rfc-compliant _anyway_, because 
> everybody really realizes just how annoying that would really be.
> 

Linus, just admit it: copying and pasting from git-log output into the MUA
is *useful*.  And you've made it less reliable.