Bug#706778: debian-policy: Please explicitly forbid "-" at the start of Deb822 field names

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 03:45:51PM +0200, Guillem Jover a écrit :
> On Mon, 2013-09-16 at 11:32:14 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> >  
> >  </p><p><taglist>
> > +<tag>5.1</tag>
> > +  <item>Control data fields must not start with the hyphen character
> > +  (<tt>-</tt>) because it interferes with clearsigning control data files.
> > +  </item>
> >  <tag>5.4, 5.6.24</tag>
> >    <item><tt>Checksums-Sha1</tt> and <tt>Checksums-Sha256</tt> are now
> >    mandatory in <file>.dsc</file> files.
> 
> Strictly speaking the problem is with (all?) deb822 parsers that do
> not dash-unescape clearsigned messages not with the possibly
> dash-escaped control files, proper dash-escaping is there precisely
> to avoid any interference from initial dashes.
> 
> And the reason to ban initial hyphens is because they do not make
> sense in field names and I don't think it's worth updating all
> parsers.

Thanks Guillem,

I will replace "because it interferes with clearsigning control data files" by
"to avoid potential confusions when parsing clearsigned control data files that
were not properly unescaped".

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan