On Sun, 2010-08-29 at 04:17 -0700, PJ Weisberg wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> > Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> >> Le Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 10:24:57AM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> >>
> >>> In fields where the value may not span multiple lines, the amount
> >>> of whitespace in the field body is not significant. Any amount of
> >>> whitespace is equivalent to a single space. Whitespace must not
> >>> appear inside names (of packages, architectures, files, or anything
> >>> else) or version numbers, or between the characters of
> >>> multi-character version relationships.
> >
> >> I still have difficulties to understand the meaning of this paragraph,
> >> and to what fields it applies. Is it just specifiying that the parser,
> >> in the case of fields that allow continuation lines, can be either
> >> instructed to replace all white spaces and newlines by single spaces, or
> >> to leave the value as it is, including the new lines?
> >
> > No, it's really trying to say that the amount of whitespace isn't
> > significant. I'm not sure how else to explain it. That's one of those
> > precise terms of art for which there isn't really an acceptable synonym,
> > at least not that I can think of. Replacing all whitespace with a single
> > space is one of the things that you can do *because* the amount of
> > whitespace is not significant, but it's not an equivalent statement.
>
> It might be more *precise* to say that the field contains a series of
> whitespace-delimited tokens, but I don't know if that would be more
> *understandable*.
Given the target audience (i.e. the ornery DD :-) it seems likely to me
that they would then want to know if those tokens can be quoted strings.
The above text seems to me to remove the possibility of that
question :-)
Sure it's maybe a little wordy, but it's explicit also,and not too
unreadable.
Cheers,
Andrew.
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