> Right, but then we have:
>
> author
> author_email
> authors
> maintainer
> maintainer_email
>
> for consitency, we'd also need:
>
> author_emails
> maintainers
> maintainer_emails

In my mind the "perfect" situation would be just two arguments:

- authors  (goes in Author field - possibly multi-valued)
- contact_email (goes in Contact-email field)

And deprecate the others.

The "maintainer" concept is not on the metadata side, so it's not used
at *all* by the third-party tools or by PyPI.  

Adding it in the metadata adds more confusion imho than deprecate its
usage on Distutils side to stick with a very simple concept:

- a distribution has authors
- a distribution has a contact email.

So I am -1 adding Maintainer/Maintainer-email in the Metadata.

Now for the "Contact-email", it guess it's OK to keep "author_email ->
Author-email", and it's no big deal is "Author" stays singled valued,
as long as it contains all authors names right ?

So at the end, the changes on distutils setup() side would be:

- authors  (goes in Author field - with "," separations )
- contact_email  (goes in Author-email field)
- deprecation of the "author", "author_email", 
  "maintainer" and "mainainer_email" arguments 

So the metadata doesn't change and we have what we want.