Re: Bug#494714: dpkg-dev - dpkg-genchanges should fold lines
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 09:31:26PM +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-05-16 at 02:10 -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >
> > It is my recollection that each field in the control file (and
> > perhaps others) was supposed to follow rfc822 (now rfc5322), and that
> > says:
> > ,----
> > | Each header field is logically a single line of characters comprising
> > | the field name, the colon, and the field body. For convenience
> > | however, and to deal with the 998/78 character limitations per line,
> > | the field body portion of a header field can be split into a
> > | multiple-line representation; this is called "folding". The general
> > | rule is that wherever this specification allows for folding white
> > | space (not simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be inserted before any
> > | WSP.
> > |
> > | The process of moving from this folded multiple-line representation
> > | of a header field to its single line representation is called
> > | "unfolding". Unfolding is accomplished by simply removing any CRLF
> > | that is immediately followed by WSP. Each header field should be
> > | treated in its unfolded form for further syntactic and semantic
> > | evaluation. An unfolded header field has no length restriction and
> > | therefore may be indeterminately long.
> > `----
> >
> > So, each field is always one logical line, but may consist of
> > multiple physical lines.
> >
> > I suggest we add explanation like this to the policy document.
>
> It seems reasonable that we should follow this manner of specification,
> but will this introduce any issues for fields which are currently
> defined as multiple lines?
I think removing entirely the CRLF is wrong for our purpose: it should be kept
in the field value and handled as white space by the code that parse the field.
I do that work my own project and it works perfectly fine.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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