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

[Cyrille Chepelov <chepelov@calixo.net>]

Le dim, mar 25, 2001, à 01:49:23 +0100, Wichert Akkerman a écrit:

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

Actually, I wasn't that concerned with the display side (which is already
well handled), but about the writing side. Oh, well "tame your $EDITOR and
don't pollute -policy".

> > 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.

... having different behaviour on different fields (on the transport part of
handling the control file), at least on the specification side, makes tools
either more complex or more liberal than necessary.

> > 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'. 

Yes ; but lintian failing to enforce that on some fields (but not all)
confused me a bit... since there's not yet a publicly accessible, clear an
authoritative list of which fields can have what variation of syntax, I
can't blame it (but submitted #90992 nonetheless).

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

Hmmm... yes. Will rewrite this in the suitable format (should a positive
consensus happen.. ahem.)

	-- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.