Re: Names of Fields in Control Files

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 01:35:00AM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm certainly OK with policy requiring field names to be ASCII.
> 
> I think that's probably the right thing to do.

Dear all,

how about simply paraphrasing the RFC 822/5832, which our the source of
inspiration ? In that case, the requirement for field names will be to be
printable ASCII characters, except colons.

I propose the following change in the context the patch that I am preparing for
clarifying the Policy's chapter about control files, in bug #593909.

diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index be0a505..5c72355 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -2493,9 +2493,11 @@ endif
        <p>
          Each paragraph consists of a series of data fields; each
          field consists of the field name, followed by a colon and
-         then the data/value associated with that field.  It ends at
-         the end of the line or at the end of the last
-         continuation line (see below).  Horizontal whitespace
+         then the data/value associated with that field.  The field
+         name is composed of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e.,
+         characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive),
+         except colon.  The field ends at the end of the line or at
+         the end of the last continuation line (see below).  Horizontal whitespace
          (spaces and tabs) may occur immediately before or after the
          value and is ignored there; it is conventional to put a
          single space after the colon.  For example, a field might


Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan