Re: Oddidies in the .mailmap parser & future syntax extensions

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

[Changed subject]

[jc: culled CC addresses]

I'd expect:

    Foo [off-list ref] Bar

To be an alias/shorthand for:

    Foo [off-list ref] Bar [off-list ref]

OK.

More annoying is that this:

    New [off-list ref] [off-list ref]
    [off-list ref] [off-list ref]

Doesn't mean the same as:
...
I.e. I'd expect the name to map to the empty string, *unless* we saw an
earlier address, i.e. just as we do for the first bar -> foo line (we
map it to a name of "New", we don't map it to an empty name).

You expect the first one to map (anyname, [off-list ref]) to
("New", [off-list ref]) and you describe the second one does not
map the human-readable part to "New", but it is unclear what the
code does, or why you expect it to map to "" (or what your
expectation is, for that matter, exactly---do you want an empty
string, or do you want "New", or something else???).

FWIW, if we were designing it from scratch, I'd expect the second
one to map (anyname, [off-list ref]) to ($1, [off-list ref]),
keeping the human-readable part as-is and only map the e-mail part.

Or do you expect that when these two entries appear together, the
first entry with "New" is carried over to the second entry?

Doing that would be strictly backwards compatible, i.e. now we'll
entirely ignore the 3rd E-Mail address. It does mean we also
accidentally support things like:

    New [off-list ref] [off-list ref] # A comment, because we ignore everything after the 2nd address

But don't tell anyone I told you that :) But that is something that
might technically have inadvertently closed the door to future syntax
extensions, but we could probably do them anyway, or at worst have some
heuristic.

I vaguely recall that it was not an accident but a deliberate
feature to allow comments, but don't tell anyone I told you that.