Re: email address handling

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@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 <davem@davemloft.net>

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 <torvalds@osdl.org>

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