Bug#90989: proposal] making all control fields multi-line

[Wichert Akkerman <wichert@valinux.com>]

Previously Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> Dependencies and Build-Dependencies can be quite long, which means either 
> using a lot of horizontal scrolling, or violating the policy (since lintian
> checks for single-lineness of some fields but not those, and dpkg is happy
> with that, and the buildds too, it's easy to forget that it's not allowed).

This is a completely bogus argument: all fields are logically one line,
although they can be split over multiple lines in transport. Please read
RFC822 for all the details.

Frontends shouldn't force one to do horizontal scrolling, they should
do proper wrapping of the data when displaying it.

> It would make sense to allow the relationship fields to be multi-line;

It would make sense only since we use RFC822 syntax, which allows for
fields to be split over multiple lines.

> Requiring tools to accept multi-line values everywhere should help keeping
> them simpler (actually, a lot of them already seem to do this, anyway).

This should be through due to the simple guideline `be strict in what you
output, but liberal in what you accept'. 

> Proposed changes:
> [in section 3.1, Syntax of control fields]

Please always submit proposed changes as a diff to the sgml text.

Wichert.

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