Bug#555978: debian-policy: Forbid duplicate fields in control files
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> Andrew McMillan <andrew@morphoss.com> writes:
>> On Sat, 2010-06-12 at 18:18 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
>>> as a non-native speaker, I have difficulties with the use of 'may' in
>>> your patch: if fields may be unique, they also may be not unique, so
>>> what is the message in this sentence? It does not give me the
>>> impression that the goal is to discourage the use of the same field
>>> name twice in the same paragraph.
>>> How about “A paragraph should not contain data fields having the same
>>> name.”
>> In this sense 'may' should be read as 'must', however I think that if
>> it causes readability issues for non-native english speakers then the
>> word 'must' should actually be used...
>> "Each paragraph must contain at most one instance of a particular
>> field name."
>> Is that clearer?
> Yes, indeed, that's what I meant; I'll go with that (assuming that
> doesn't have a different clarity problem that I'm missing).
Hm, actually, better (slightly less awkward, I think):
A paragraph must not contain more than one instance of a particular
field name.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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