Re: netscape 2.0-1 released

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

I apologise to Brian for my intemperate response to his question.

brian white writes ("Re: netscape 2.0-1 released "):
...
> No, I don't *have* to include tho dots as long as there is a space as
> the leading character (as I said in my original post)!  It works fine
> without them.  Nobody ever said a word about the other packages I have
> released.  If you *want* them included, then that is fine by me, but
> be civil about it.

There are two ways of thinking about this.  One is a policy level.
The policy (as stated in the Guidelines) is that you have to put in
the dot.  Since it is our policy that Debian packages have to conform
to the Guidelines you have to put in the dots.

This is less than helpful, though.  The real reason that I wrote that
policy is that trailing spaces in files tend to get lost.  The
Packages file is quite important for dselect, dftp &c and they can't
read a file which has had a spurious blank line inserted, and there's
no real guarantee that the Packages file (which is, after all, just
plain text) won't go through (say) a VMS system and have all trailing
whitespace removed.

Furthermore, many people's editors will automatically remove trailing
whitespace from text files being edited, and putting that trailing
space in your control file therefore makes the source package easier
to break - it's bad practice, therefore.

I hope this answers your question to your satisfaction.

Ian.