Bug#148194: Policy amendment to permit multi-line fields in debian/control
Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> Hello folks,
>> I have proposed a modification for Policy that will permit wrapping in
>> the following fields in debian/control:
> Wouldn't it be better to require all tools to accept multi-line fields
> for any field? And recommend using it for long lines (say the usual 80
> chars)?
In the long term, yes, I think so. In the short term, that work hasn't
already been done. Basically, I have no objections to moving that
direction in the long term, but I don't want to let the best be the enemy
of the good. This proposal, so far as I've been able to determine,
documents capabilities that are available right now and provides 80% of
the usability of allowing wrapping everywhere from the perspective of the
package maintainer. Since I expect, given the length of development
cycles on these things, it would take another couple of years to update
all the tools to allow wrapping anywhere, I'd like to move forward with
this and then improve from there over time.
Hopefully that makes sense and seems like a reasonable approach to
everyone.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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