Re: Syntax issues in Policy Manual
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Right, but in my view it's one of exactly two “correct” forms for such a
> field:
>
> Foo-Field: spam, eggs, beans
>
> Foo-Field:
> spam,
> eggs,
> beans
> I would like the latter form recorded in policy as good form for
> multi-line fields.
Why would Debian Policy take a stance on something like that? Both of
those forms are valid syntax, as is:
Foo-Field: spam, eggs,
beans
and:
Foo-Field: spam
, eggs ,
beans
and any number of other things. Are you asking for the syntax to be made
much more restrictive? If so, why? If not, I think I'm confused about
what you're asking for.
In general, Debian Policy doesn't give recommended coding styles or best
practices; that's left for the Developer's Reference and other documents.
I suppose there is a bit of best practice recommendation for relationship
fields in particular about spacing, and a few other notes about spacing
elsewhere in the document, so this is a bit of an exception, but I'm not
sure it's a good idea to add more of that.
> The proximal motivation for this is the Lintian check that results in
> the ‘debian-control-has-unusual-field-spacing’ tag.
I'm a bit confused. The only thing that triggers that tag is:
Foo-Field:spam
with no space after the colon. Or a literal tab, I suppose.
Are you perhaps using a version of Lintian prior to 2.2.12 and therefore
running into Bug#528377?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: