Re: Bug#521810: debian-policy: Document user defined fields starting with X-
On Mon, Mar 30 2009, Nils Rennebarth wrote:
>
> Please add something along the following lines to the section 5.7
> "User defined fields" to the debian policy manual:
>
> Usually, unknown fields are iggnored by the debian packaging
> system. To avoid conflicts of user defined fields with field that may
> be used by debian in the future, we suggest to use field names
> starting with X- (so you need to put X[BCS]-X-foo into the control
> file) which are guaranteed to never conflict with future official
Umm, what? If Debian wants to use some fields, it should not use
fields with X-; since we are the standards maker for the control
file. If you add another X- fied, will we, in a few months, ask people
to add X-X-X- so that Debian may use X-X- in the future? Where does it
stop?
> fields. That has the added bonus that dpkg-deb will not issue warnings
> about user defined fields at package build time.
If a warning about user defined fields in dpkg-deb is not
desirable, should we not instead fix dpkg-deb to only emit such
warnings in verbose mode? Adding another X- to shut off warnings as a
side effect seems a hack.
manoj
--
Make it sufficiently difficult for people to do something, and most
people will stop doing it. -- Robert Sommer
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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