I think that a lot of EMail addresses and HTTP references could
benefit from it, especially that almost everybody has a WWW browser
nowadays.
For the Maintainers we could have to projects (programs) on top with
references to the people involved. There an URL from the individual
people could reference even an entry in the Credits file (intead of
referring to an address within the Maintainers file). Thus we would
even have less redundancy (addresses only stored once).
I would even volunteer to make the initial change. Currently I'm not
subscribed to the list, so if you want to be sure that I receive your
comments, add me to the CC:.
Finally, even if the file format will stay the same, we could finally
agree whether the source tree should be US_ASCII (i.e. 7bit), or ISO
8859 Latin 1 (8bit, Linux default). Currently the Maintainers file is
8bit, but there was a heavy (you'll remember) discussion about 8bit
characters and MIME's quoted printable encapsulation. Just assuming
ESMTP/8bit is a violation to existing Internet standards (e.g. our
mail hub will strip the 8th bit from all characters).
8bit characters are a problem when attaching patches to 7bit EMail
with no global MIME support. For personal reasons I would vote for
global MIME support, because you might be able to chose your EMail
frontend, but not your mail hub. Then we can happily send out the
things as we want to have it (8bit).
My intention was not starting another flame war, but to move to some
standards.
Ulrich