Bug#647551: lintian: lintian-info outputs extra EOL whitespaces in tag descriptions

[jari <jari.aalto@cante.net>]

On 2011-11-03 20:15, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
| On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 21:32 +0200, Jari Aalto wrote:
| > There seems to be extra EOL whitespaces in output after each paragraph
| > break.
| [...]
| >     E: wv: binary-or-shlib-defines-rpath usr/bin/wvConvert /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu$
| >     N:$
| >     N:   The binary or shared library sets RPATH. This overrides the normal$
| >     N:   library search path, possibly interfering with local policy and$
| >     N:   causing problems for multilib, among other issues.$
| >     N:   $
| >     N:   The only time a binary or shared library in a Debian package should$
| 
| Indeed there does.  I have to ask though, why is this a problem in any
| way?  What is processing lintian output in a way that's so sensitive to
| the possible presence of such whitespace?
| 
| In fact, I'd argue that removing it would actually be wrong.  The entire
| description is indented by three spaces and the paragraph breaks are
| part of that description.

In general, I believe the outputs should be clean and have no extra EOL
whitespaces.

E.g. Git version control by default refuses to inject code that
contains EOL whitespace.

For that reason I have configured Emacs to use whitespace-mode
globally; as it happens it also shows problematic outputs in M-x shell
buffer as well with red colors (quite distracting actually).

I't a simple operation in Perl to fix:

    perl -e '$_ = "this  \n  line\n   \n  \n"; s/[ \t]+$//gsm; print'

Jari