> Le Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 11:00:54PM +0200, Jakub Wilk a écrit : > > * Michael Tautschnig <mt@debian.org>, 2012-10-01, 14:25: > > >>By policy, blank lines separate paragraphs, comments are > > >>discarded, so we end up with an empty first paragraph. Policy, > > >>however, requires that the *first* paragraph contains essential > > >>package information (Policy 5.2). > > > > I'm not convinced by this interpretation the Policy. Common sense > > tells me that there's no such thing as "empty paragraph". So the > > question is: are empty liens allowed at the beginning of a control > > file? I don't see an answer to that question in the Policy, > > unfortunately. > > Indeed, the Policy does not consider that case. > > This said, the format of the control data files is inspired from the RFC822, > which contains the following in its section 4.1: > > message = fields *( CRLF *text ) ; Everything after > ; first null line > ; is message body > If there is consent that we stay close to RFC822, then I read this as "there must not be a blank line (CRLF) before the essential package information. > Another important factor for the Policy is the "current practice". Before > proposing that empty lines are allowed or disallowed in control data files, I > think that we would need to survey what is done in Debian. For instnace, is > gnome-pkg-tools an outlier, are there tools tolerating initial empty lines on > purpose, what is the situation for other control data files, etc. > [...] I do not yet have data covering the entire archive, only arch:any packages for letters a-p have been rebuilt so far. For that fraction (12915 out of 17369 packages), we have 184 packages broken by gnome-pkg-tools (including gnome-pkg-tools itself) and only 3 other packages that have comments and a blank line in there. But then either all build infrastructure (and also lintian) don't use debian/control, or all these tools tolerate that blank line (with the exception of pbuilder). Best, Michael
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