Can we separate authors with ; instead of \n please?

[Andrew Bennetts]

ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net wrote:
> jml, lifeless and I were talking about a search language yesterday
> so users can doing something like ...
> 
>   bzr log -s committer=me:
> 
> With this in mind, I'm wondering whether it would make searching
> authors easier if they were separated by ; instead of a newline
> internally.

I'm not sure this is the right way to approach the problem.  Why should the
internal representation of a multi-valued field leak into the UI?

i.e. I'd expect a hypothetical query tool to let me match on “author is X”,
and have bzr just DTRT when there are multiple authors on a commit, without
me as a user caring if they are delimited by \n, ;, \0, or ♫  :)

(I'd almost expect the internal representation to be the presence of
multiple “author” properties on the one revision, rather than a single
“authors” property, but that's much of a muchness...)

-Andrew.