Ok, it actually was a bug, but not with semicolons - the livecheck target wasn't de-escaping the URL, so the presence of any whitespace, semicolons, or curly braces would cause this issue.

On Jun 9, 2007, at 4:17 PM, Kevin Ballard wrote:

It's not a bug. It's the fact that the semicolon character is treated the same as a newline, in that it separates commands. This is a Tcl language feature.

If you want a semicolon, either surround the entire value with double-quotes, or use a backslash to escape the semicolon.

livecheck.url "${homepage}release/?C=M;O=D"
livecheck.url ${homepage}release/?C=M\;O=D