Hello,

funny the bug report should surface in the very same time I was looking
for a way to put 2 authors in the 'author' field :-)

[Antoine Pitrou (pitrou)]
> It is still unknown what use case the new "author" scheme would solve 
> that the old one doesn't

I believe I have such a use case. I'm in the middle of taking over a
Python package and I would like to give credits to the original author
who passed the development over to me. You see, *he is* the author of
95% of the code, it seems unfair to replace his name with my own. I
thought I could simply use a list of authors but the 'author' field
hasn't been designed for it.

[Antoine Pitrou (pitrou)]
> (does someone want the "author"field to be machine parsable?
> for what purpose?),

I'm just a regular user and when I see a field described as a 'meta' one
then I'm actually not wondering how any future tools will take 
advantage of it. It being a 'meta' I understand it's mostly meant to be
interpreted by machines which, funnily enough, seems to be just to the
contrary of what you say.

Of course one can put anything they wish into 'author', it could even 
be CSV or XML but that's not the point, the point is that some things
simply have two and more authors and inserting the mailing list isn't
exactly the same. Sure, I can simply put it all in an AUTHORS file but
again it's not the same, what would be the 'author' field for then?

If someone were to ask me then I'd say there should only be the 'author'
and 'contributor' fields which both have a clear meaning in open-source
world, accepting both a string and a list/tuple in format of 'Foo Bar
<foobar@example.com>' which makes for easy parsing and other fields
discussed here should be deprecated. No one likes type checking but at
least it would provide backwards-compat for the most widely used field.
Just my 2c.

author = 'Foo Bar <foobar@example.com>'
author = ['Foo Bar <foobar@example.com>', 'Baz Frobble
<bazfrobble@example.com>']

But hey, I still very much like distutils :-) and I understand all the 
backwards-compatibility concerns, but as a user I can clearly see a need
for /some/ way to specify more than one author without having to wonder
what will any not-yet-written tool do with this or any other meta field.