Separator for multiple authors on command lines (was: Can we separate authors with ; instead of \n please?)

[James Westby]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 11:34 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net writes:
> 
> > With this in mind, I'm wondering whether it would make searching
> > authors easier if they were separated by ; instead of a newline
> > internally.
> 
> A semicolon would cause problems with command-lines; ‘;’ is a command
> separator.
> 
> Perhaps comma (‘,’) is better as a delimiter, since it's such a common
> delimiter for other multi-value arguments on command lines.

As pointed out by Colin, it's a pretty bad separator to choose.

Anyway, try this with bzr.dev

  bzr commit --author "foo\n<foo at foo.org"

you will probably get an error.

That's because this is not the way to specify mulitple authors anyway.
The change I made also turned --author from a string option to a list
option, i.e. the way to specify multiple authors is

  bzr commit --author "author1" --author "author2"

So it matters little what the internal separator is.

Thanks,

James