Bug#666726: debian-policy: Clarify if empty control fields are ollowed or not

[Matthias Urlichs <matthias@urlichs.de>]

Hi,

Charles Plessy:
> Later, I might propose on debian-devel and debian-dpkg to forbid empty fields
> in the whole specification (which means, since we are not using empty fields,
> to guarantee that valid files do not and will not contain empty fields).
> 
> (For the avoidance of doubt, by empty I mean: nothing or whitespace only after
> the colon.)
> 
Why? Because of variable substitution when processing the source control
file, we need to do empty-entry removal there anyway, so any external
substitution mechanism (e.g. producing d/control from d/control.in)
would have to repeat that algorithm. Unnecessarily.

Today, any such substitution can be pretty dumb, e.g. a shell loop or a
couple of s/@VAR@/value/g regexps, and I'd like to be able to keep doing
that.

-- 
-- Matthias Urlichs