email address anti-spam encoding in portfiles

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On May 16, 2007, at 5:12 PM, James Berry wrote:

> Following discussion with several of you, and more thought, my  
> thinking is now:
>
> 	(1) Obfuscate plain text email addresses by using the form:
>
> 		- tld/domain/username
> 			user at bar.com ==> com/bar/user
>
> 		- if there are multiple components in the hostname, only the dot  
> before the tld is turned into a slash:
> 			user at foo.bar.com ==> com/foo.bar/user
>
> 		- If the domain/tld is macports.org, then it may be dropped:
> 			user at macports.org ==> user

This kind of begs the question:  What's the point of these fields again?

Is it to report bugs?   I suspect not, since we have a bug tracking  
system for that already and if you're going to contact the maintainer  
directly then you're short-circuiting the bug reporting mechanism and  
will probably just get a nice reply saying "please file a bug report"  
if the maintainer is as busy as most folks anyway.

Is it for port maintainers to talk to other port maintainers?   If  
so, we could just as easily keep this information in a side database  
and have the maintainer field in the portfile contain some sort of  
identifier that's purely unique to the macports project and doesn't  
even need to look like an email address - it could be a hash of  
someone's account record.

Needless to say, in either case we could also have a port command  
which did the right thing with the information to preserve ease of  
use.  "port bug" to automatically open and jump into a new bug  
report, "port feedback" to talk to the maintainer.  Since you've now  
front-ended the process, there's no need to make the Portfiel fields  
even vaguely comprehensible to a spammer.

Thoughts?

- Jordan

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