Bug#593909: debian-policy: Clarifications about the syntax of Debian control files.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 03:23:26PM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 
> 
> I have been reading §5.1 (Syntax of control files) many times recently, and
> would like propose clarifications about a couple of points. If consensus emerges,
> I will write a patch.
> 
> 
> Non-wrappable field values
 
> Ordering of the paragraphs
 
> Line escape and paragraph separators

Hi again,

to this list I would like to add comment lines. Currently they are described in
§5.2 (5.2 Source package control files -- debian/control), as an additional
syntax, which strongly suggests that they are allowed in this file only.
Independantly of whether this is confirmed or not, this syntactic information
would rather belong to §5.1, that defines the syntax of the control files,
instead of §5.2, which like the next chapters §5.3–6 lists the fields allowed
in the different Debian control files. I would therefore propose to have in
§5.1:

  Lines starting with # without any preceding whitespace are ‘comments lines’
  and are ignored, even in the middle of continuation lines for a multiline
  field. They do not end a multiline field.

If comment lines are only allowed in source package control files, we could
add:

  The use of such comments must be allowed on a per-file basis.

And then in §5.2:

  Comment lines are allowed.

The benefit of this is that it concentrates in §5.1 all the instructions to
write a basic parser for Debian control files.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan