On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 01:49:40PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> > This is no longer the case. Starting from policy 3.7.0 (see
> > /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz) all fields
> upgrading-checklist is not canonical and tends to take short cuts in
> wording. It's really intended just to provide pointers to the sections
> that you want to re-read. Section 5.1 says:
>
> Many fields' values may span several lines; in this case each
> continuation line must start with a space or a tab. Any trailing
> spaces or tabs at the end of individual lines of a field value are
> ignored.
>
> In fields where it is specified that lines may not wrap, only a
> single line of data is allowed and whitespace is not significant in
> a field body.
FWIW, I did not point to upgrading-checklist with the intention of
considering it the ultimate reference, but only at the quickest
reference I came up to. In the past I did refer to the actual policy
text (the context was an extension I've proposed for dctrl-tools,
which concerned multi-line values).
Apparently though, I was indeed convinced that all fields (except
Descriptions) were meant to be multi-lines. Even if this is not the
right context to raise the issue, I notice that from the wording
reported by Russ, the feeling is that the "majority" of fields is
meant to be multi-lines. I've no idea if this feeling is intentional
or not, but you might be interested in such a feedback.
BTW, I'm interested in knowing if the intention is to have opt-in or
opt-out multi-lineness for fields. To me, it seems reasonable to have
it opt-out (i.e. the default is multi-line).
Anyhow, back to the original topic, cause we are getting OT here
... :-)
On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 03:58:16PM +0100, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
<snipping discussion about multi-line fields _in general_>
> However, "apt-cache showsrc libtie-hash-regex-perl" still shows an
> unwrapped Vcs-Browser field, which is what Lintian is complaining
> about.
Vcs-* fields are logically single line.
That, to me, would be a "full stop sentence".
If physically they are split over multiple lines this is fine, but
logically they remain one line. Hence, debcheckout should cope with
that. Too bad that devscripts only Recommends dctrl-tools, otherwise
debcheckout could have been made to use grep-available which will soon
gain multi-line joining capabilities.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature