[RFI] bzr-keywords & forward compatibility

[Ian Clatworthy]

After eol conversion, keyword templates are likely to be
the most widely used application of content filters. I've
put together the bzr-keywords plugin for this purpose and
I'd like feedback from the list on the design. As the many
days of eol discussion have shown, "community intelligence"
vastly exceeds mine alone. :-)

So my #1 issue is getting a *stable* set of keywords with
stable expected content. Users need to be able to rely on
names being supported & semantics going forward. It would
be nice to have bzr-keywords bundled with the Windows &
Mac installers in either 1.14 or 1.15 but we don't want
widespread usage until we're comfortable of retaining
compatibility going forward.

So what are the bits that are potentially "unstable"?

1. The exact content of User & Author. Right now these are
   the full name + email address. Separate keywords are
   provided (User-Email, Author-Email) to get at just the
   email bit, making them easier to embed in URLs or Web
   pages for example. I wonder whether User & Author ought
   to *just* be the username bit - it easy to put them back
   together but hard to pull bits out? If they are just the
   Username, then perhaps we ought to name them User-Name
   and Author-Name respectively? We could support all of

   User (all of it)
   User-Name (just the name)
   User-Email (just the email)

   But I wonder whether the first is really needed if we
   provide the latter 2.

2. Multiple author handling. Right now, Author is the first
   author in the list and there's no way to get at the others.
   One simplistic answer is more keywords like:

   Author2
   Author2-Email
   Author3
   Author3-Email
   Author-Count

   If we did that, then should we rename Author to Author1?
   Also, maybe we ought to make them *look* like list items so
   that they could become exactly that iff we add a real list
   interpretation capability later, i.e. Author[1],
   Author[2]-Email, etc.

3. What's missing? These can be added later and shouldn't break
   existing keywords, but perhaps looking at additional needs will
   help us tune the names of current keywords? Some things we
   might want to add include:

   Nick (or Branch-Nick to be more descriptive?)
   Committer
   Committer-Email
   revision properties like the svn rev-id.

I'll attached the current help for those interested in this
feature and helping refine it.

Ian C.
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