Re: RFS: liblinux-kernelsort-perl | Simple sorting library for kernel version strings

["Kurt B. Kaiser" <kbk@shore.net>]

Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> writes:

>> Silly question, why?
>
> someone somewhen decided that this is bestpractise and documented the
> two leading spaces in the developers reference. roumors has it, that it
> is required for some automatic tools.
>
> as long as it is written in the developers reference, we should follow
> this best practise, or, if the bestpractise changed, update the
> developers reference.

Quoting the Debian Policy Manual, section 5.6.13, regarding the format
of lines in the extended description:

  Those starting with two or more spaces. These will be displayed
  verbatim. If the display cannot be panned horizontally, the displaying
  program will line wrap them "hard" (i.e., without taking account of
  word breaks). If it can they will be allowed to trail off to the
  right. None, one or two initial spaces may be deleted, but the number
  of spaces deleted from each line will be the same (so that you can
  have indenting work correctly, for example).


There is a reason!  I suspect it's to make it easier to extract the
url without a spurious line break.

-- 
KBK