Bug#602304: lintian: Please check debian/patches for DEP 3 syntax
Hi,
Personally, I have the feeling there is not much we can do here. In the
absence of the Description (or Subject) field, it is probably not a
DEP-3. Hench there would be nothing to do.
Supposing it is present, the only other thing we can say (assuming it is
a DEP-3 patch[2]) either Author/Subejct will be present or Origin will.
Unfortunately Origin appears to be a mess of possible forms with a lot
of "should" (as in "recommended, but strictly required"). The
Author/From field (which may be repeated) would contain the name and the
email of the "author" of the patch.
Here, DEP-3 does not specific in what way this should (or shouldn't)
be encoded. It uses an example conviently similar to the Maintainer
field, but in the From field I would expect any email to be valid (e.g.
anything accepted by mail programs).
The unstructured content and the "duplicate fields in same paragraph"
implies writing a new parser (or augmenting the existing one)... for a
set of info or pedantic tags... where most of the time we are dealing
with free-form or vaguely specified content.
Personally, with the limited time I am currently putting into Lintian, I
would prefer to spend it on important issues or trivial/well-defined
issues. You are more than welcome to write a (set of) patch(es) for it,
but if this is left to me I will probably end up tagging it wontfix.
~Niels
[1] Possible exception being spell-checking. Though we have to account
for the patch being a "typo-fix". We probably want to allow a typo in
that case like we do in the changelog.
[2] Personally I vaguely recall having patches with only a Description
field in some of my packages.
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