Re: Developer names within debian/changelog

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au> writes:

> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>
>> I don't know if it's worth being more formal here in Policy or not.
>> It might be more of a devref thing.
>
> I'm less interested in strictness in Policy than I am in finding out
> how this is *specified* for all consumers, rather than merely
> *implemented* in specific programs.
>
> Life is too short to go chasing down the difference between "that's
> the way it's specified so all consumers of the format can expect it",
> versus "that's the way it's implemented and who knows whether other
> implementations might be just as acceptable".
>
> If the answer is "there is no specification", than what on earth
> should a programmer looking to consume this format actually expect to
> consume?

Any consumer must accept anything with two leading spaces.
Expecting anything beyond that is not garantied to work. But a pretty
good bet is that it will follow the single or multi maintainer format
prodused by e.g. dch.

If you want to write your own tool to interpret a changelog entry then
you should try to share code with existing tools. There is no point in
inventing any new parser. That only leads to differences.

MfG
        Goswin