Re: RFC round 3: DEP-3: Patch Tagging Guidelines
On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Charles Plessy wrote:
> -The meta-information would be stored in a set of RFC-2822 compliant
> -fields. Those fields should start on the first non-empty line (after
> -having stripped whitespace characters at the start and end of lines).
> +The meta-information would be stored in a set of fields with a syntax
> +similar to the RFC 2822 or Debian control files. More precisely:
You remove the sentence that says where those fields should start. You
should put it back IMO. We allow for empty lines before the fields
(particulary for the dpatch case, I find it nicer to be able to leave
one empty line after the shebang).
> +Fields are logical elements composed of a field name, followed by a colon (":"),
> +followed by a field body, and terminated by a "line feed" character followed by
> +any character except "space".
You should mention the optional (but usal) space(s) after the colon. It's
not part of the field body AFAIK. And you can remove the "any character
except space" because a line with spaces only can also terminate a field
(it also terminates the whole set of fields however):
----
Field: body
continuation line
something else
----
> A field name is composed of printable characters,
> +except "colon". A field body is composed of any character except "line feed"
> +unless when it is followed with a space, in which case the space is ignored. As
> +a special exception, in the sequence of "line feed", "space", "dot" (.), "line
> +feed", "space", the spaces are ignored and the dot is replaced by a space.
That description of the field body is not very clear and easy to
understand. Maybe it should simply explain how single-line values
and multi-lines values are encoded ?
Maybe:
----
The field body is composed of any character. To avoid problems with
multi-line values, any line feed character must be followed by a space.
The line that follows is called a continuation line. Furthermore empty
lines are replaced by a single dot character.
----
> +Lines that do not belong to a field body and do not start a new field are plain
> +comments.
This looks wrong. Free form comments are meant to be after the set of
fields. We can't allow arbitrary data in the middle and assume they are
comments. Embedded comments are allowed in debian/control but they must
start with "#".
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Contribuez à Debian et gagnez un cahier de l'admin Debian Lenny :
http://www.ouaza.com/wp/2009/03/02/contribuer-a-debian-gagner-un-livre/
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