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Re: More about lintian



Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> writes:

>      * Those containing a space, a full stop and some more characters.
>        These are for future expansion. Do not use them.
> 
> dselect accepts those lines. Please, show me which "future expansion"
> are we talking about, and why we need to forbid the use of lines like
> that.

Well, if ` .foo' lines are reserved for future expansion and shouldn't
be used, then dselect is obviously free to do with them what it wants.
The current behaviour of the program is to just display them anyway, but
it would be well within its rights to simply throw them away or die with
a coredump. The possible use of troff-like commands such as `.B bold'
has been mentioned before in this thread.

As far as I am aware troff doesn't really offer an escape for a period
at the beginning of a line, either. In my opinion the `problem' is
easily fixed by simply not using such lines. It is not as if not being
able to have a period at the beginning of a line would cramp one's style
to an unbearable extent. It would be far less preferable to complicate
the code to enable an escape for what IMHO is fairly pathological in
the first place. This would be different in a general-purpose package
such as TeX, but for the purpose of package descriptions this is clearly
a restriction *I* can live with, and this seems to be the case for most
of the other developers, as well -- or it would have been fixed long ago.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau ......................... lingnau@tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs :-)  --- Linus Torvalds


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