Bug#694384: Clarify what first paragraph is in presence of blank lines
Michael Tautschnig <mt@debian.org> writes:
> At present, 213 packages fail to build using pbuilder, because they
> contain a debian/control file starting with comment lines, then a blank
> line, then the actual contents. This is caused by gnome-pkg-tools, as
> described in further detail in #684503.
> At present, policy states (in 5.2) that blank lines separate paragraphs,
> comments are discarded, and that the *first* paragraph contains
> essential package information (Policy 5.2).
> This raises the question whether an empty paragraph *is a paragraph*. I
> had initiated some discussion on d-devel [1], with no uniform opinion
> about this. In order not to base any outcome on philosophical
> discussions, I suggest to consider RFC822 as the technical base: This
> defines a message as
> message = fields *( CRLF *text ) ; Everything after
> ; first null line
> ; is message body
> with blank lines (CRLF) only being permitted after the initial fields.
I think there are two competing principles here:
1. It's always annoying to have to second-guess where comments are allowed
and where they aren't. I therefore like to err on the side of making
sure comments (and blank lines) are permitted anywhere that's sensible,
so that people don't have to memorize complex rules. That would argue
for allowing this format and fixing pbuilder.
2. debian/control is very widely parsed and used, and introducing new
syntax in it tends to break lots of things. Therefore, anything that
manipulates it should be maximally conservative.
My opinion is that (1) is the right long-term direction, but (2) is a more
immediate concern, which would argue for changing gnome-pkg-tools to not
do this in the short run, but moving towards (1).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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