Format of Description fields
I know that in the "olden days", the following was true (from the
now-deprecated Packaging Manual)
7.1 Types of formatting line in the extended description
* Those starting with a single space are part of a paragraph. Successive
lines of this form will be word-wrapped when displayed. The leading
space will usually be stripped off.
* Those starting with two or more spaces. These will be displayed
verbatim. If the display cannot be panned horizontally the displaying
program will linewrap them `hard' (ie, without taking account of word
breaks). If it can they will be allowed to trail off to the right.
None, one or two initial spaces may be deleted, but the number of
spaces deleted from each line will be the same (so that you can have
indenting work correctly, for example).
* Those containing a single space followed by a single full stop
character. These are rendered as blank lines. This is the only way to
get a blank line - see below.
* Those containing a space, a full stop and some more characters. These
are for future expansion. Do not use them.
My question is, is this still the case? The packaging manual is no longer
an official source of information as far as I know, and the policy section
corresponding to this conspicuously omits the formatting information.
In short: should frontends perform word-wrapping or not? Should bugs
of appropriate severity (normal or minor IMO) be filed against packages
which improperly format their descriptions or not?
Daniel (who had forgotten about the "two or more spaces" rule and will
go off and implement it now)
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| If you wish to live wisely, |
| ignore sayings--including this one. |
\---- Be like the kid in the movie! Play chess! -- http://www.uschess.org ---/
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