Raphael Hertzog wrote:
After having accepted the patch, I wondered where it should be documented and Nils pointed me to the policy section. So I asked him to submit a bug here. I fail to see any problem with telling people outside of Debian that they can freely use "X-" fields for their private use. You might want to say to DD that are inventing new fields, that they should not make them start with X- if they ever expect it to be standardized.
You should document it in dpkg-deb, but I don't think policy is the right place (but ev. in a footnote). A package that uses: X-foo: bar is policy compliant? Could/should be installed on official Debian archives? IMHO the answers are no. Realted problems: - so which policy item would violate a such package? - having an x- field and a Standards-Version field is wrong? So I think such text in policy would confuse the developer, and I don't like having something like that in policy: "user defined field are prefixed by x-, but MUST NOT be used on official packages". ciao cate