Re: 2 lintian v2.5.10.2ubuntu2.1 problems

[Daniel Pfeiffer <occitan@t-online.de>]

la 2013-01-08 01:02 Russ Allbery skribis:

Daniel Pfeiffer <occitan@t-online.de> writes:

The 1st is true, but intended and in accordance with
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Description
"Successive lines of this form will be word-wrapped when displayed."
Synaptic indeed does just that, and it looks much better than the hard
line breaks in many descriptions.  Besides, synaptic gives more
interline gap for a hard line break than for one it wrapped itself.
Please remove a warning that's in contradiction to debian-policy!

Synaptic should also word-wrap any paragraph whose lines start with only
one space, so there's no need to avoid wrapping lines to get good wrapping
behavior.  (If Synaptic doesn't do this, that's a bug in Synaptic that
needs to be fixed there, rather than in your package, since practically
every Debian package in the archive wraps its description in the control
file.)

It's correct for you to wrap the paragraph with hard newlines in the
control file, and then let front-ends rewrap the paragraph to the
appropriate screen width when they need to.  Unwrappable paragraphs are
indicated by two leading spaces.

This is covered in the section of Policy that you point to:

    Those starting with a single space are part of a paragraph. Successive
    lines of this form will be word-wrapped when displayed. The leading
    space will usually be stripped off. The line must contain at least one
    non-whitespace character.

Somewhat ambiguous.  From this I can't see that long lines should be forbidden, as lintian tries to impose, nor that multiple such lines should be together wrapped into one paragraph.  The wrapping sentence to me suggest that they will be wrapped individually, which is what synaptic implements.

so I think you're just misreading it and/or being misled by a bug in
Synaptic.  (I don't know if Synaptic is buggy in this regard since I don't
use it.)

Synaptic word wraps nicely.  But it has three different modes:

• real paragraphs separated by a dot-only line
• slightly extra high lines, but less than a paragraph, for hard newlines (not mandated by Debian policy, but maybe useful)
  
• word processor style wrapping for paragraphs not containing a newline
  

The one that gets it wrong is dpkg-deb -I – no wrapping occurs, despite what the policy says.  I don't know any other tools.

coralament / best Grötens / liebe Grüße / best regards / elkorajn salutojn
Daniel Pfeiffer

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