Bug#500661: lintian: allow literally '?' in extended description

[markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.0.0
Severity: wishlist


Lintian reports a warning when there is a question mark ('?') in the
extended desription of a debconf template.
The reason is that there should be no questions in it.
But it's a problem if you want to insert a literally '?'.

An example text is:
	"You can use wildcard expressions like '*' or '?'."

In this case, no warning should be thrown.


It would be good to not simply search for question marks but for
question marks at the end of sentences.

Here is a patch from Stephen Gran (given on debian-mentors):

--- a/checks/debconf
+++ b/checks/debconf
@@ -312,7 +312,7 @@ foreach my $template (@templates) {
                tag "malformed-question-in-templates", $template->{template};
            }                                                                                                                                                                 
        }                                                                                                                                                                     
- if (defined ($extended) && $extended =~ /\?/) {
+ if (defined ($extended) && $extended =~ /\?(\s+|$)/) {
            tag "using-question-in-extended-description-in-templates", $template->{template};
        }                                                                                                                                                                     
        if ($type eq 'note') {


(note: the '+' in the regexp seems not to be needed)

See http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2008/09/msg00414.html and
follow-ups for further information.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-686
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)