Re: Bug#494714: dpkg-dev - dpkg-genchanges should fold lines
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> It is my recollection that each field in the control file (and
> perhaps others) was supposed to follow rfc822 (now rfc5322), and that
> says:
Well, that's definitely not currently the case, and we just added
support for folding in 3.8.0 (IIRC) for several specific fields while
deciding at the time that folding was *not* allowed in others.
We can allow folding everywhere; it's certainly cleaner. But we know
that there's software that will break and will need to be fixed.
BTW, Andrew is also correct: in RFC 5322 semantics, software cannot and
is not supposed to distinguish between folded headers and the equivalent
unfolded header, but we require exactly that for Description. In other
words, RFC 5322 mandates that the following header fields are
semantically identical:
Description: foo . bar
Description: foo
.
bar
That's not what we want, so we can't only defer to RFC 5322. We at
least need a special exception for Description and any other similar
field (Changes and arguably Files and Checksums-*, for instance).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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