Bug#148194: Policy amendment to permit multi-line fields in debian/control

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Hello folks,

I have proposed a modification for Policy that will permit wrapping in the
following fields in debian/control:

    Depends
    Recommends
    Suggests
    Enhances
    Pre-Depends
    Conflicts
    Provides
    Replaces
    Build-Depends
    Build-Depends-Indep
    Build-Conflicts
    Build-Conflicts-Indep

and recommend ("should") that all packaging tools support wrapping in:

    Uploaders

with a note that, in the future, support will be mandatory and packages
will be allowed to wrap the Uploaders field.

By wrap, I mean the RFC 2822-style multi-line fields permitted in general
in control files by Policy.  The new Policy amendment allows this *only*
in debian/control in source packages and requires that any tool that
generates another control file from debian/control unwrap the field (by
eliding all line breaks) when generating the other control file.

My belief is that this is the current behavior of the packaging tools and
that this does nothing beyond bring Policy in line with the current
implementation.  (Uploaders is left in a separate category because I
believe this was already supported by the version of dpkg and dpkg-dev in
sarge for all fields except Uploaders.)  However, I would greatly
appreciate it if you would look over Bug #148194 against debian-policy and
follow up in that bug with any concerns or problems that you have with
this change.

Thanks!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>