Re: netscape 2.0-1 released
On Tue, 20 Feb 1996, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 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.
Well, Ian, I'm not sure that the dot is any better character than the
blank line. Several editors take the bare dot (ie. '.<CR>') as the
end-of-edit flag. I have been told by several members of this list that
sending such a sequense in an email message can choke their mailer.
Wouldn't ':' or '>' be better characters for this? Does dpkg actually
care what the character is? Does it check?
TIA,
Dwarf
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Black Creek Critters e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net
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