Bug#446712: debian-policy: document comments in debian/control

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 08:39:38 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org> writes:
> > On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 18:46:54 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > > dpkg has supported comments (ignoring lines starting with #) in
> > > debian/control since 1.10.11.  We should at least consider documenting
> > > them.  (Encountered while processing lintian's bug backlog.)
> 
> > should this be restricted to debian/control, or apply to all control
> > files? (deb-control(5) seems to imply the latter, but maybe it's safer
> > to only allow this in policy 5.2 rather than 5.1.)

The man page is wrong, and that specific part should be moved to
something like dsc-control or similar. We have talked about this in
the team at some point but will probably be doing during 1.15.x.

> I suspect that we should restrict it to debian/control, since I believe
> dpkg-* will strip out the comments and they may otherwise give other tools
> heartburn.  Might be good to ask the dpkg developers for a sure response.

All dpkg programs using the C parsing code do not handle # as a comment,
and will happily take it as part of the field name if it contains a colon
(as in «#Foo: bar»), otherwise it will barf about an invalid field.

The dpkg perl programs that use the Dpkg::Control or Dpkg::Cdata modules
do supprort comments.

regards,
guillem