Bug#666726: debian-policy: Clarify if empty control fields are ollowed or not
Le Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 09:52:49AM +0100, Matthias Urlichs a écrit :
>
> 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.
Hi Matthias,
just to clarify: I think that the specification of the format of the Debian
control files in "paragraph" format only applies to final files, not to
transient representations during processing of these files, nor to templates
such as debian/control.in.
Actually, the Debian source package control file (debian/control) itself is
already very much like a template, and the exceptions that we have for it are
to some extent a description of the de facto templating system used by dpkg.
Perhaps it might be interesting to refactor the Policy's chapter 5 under this
perspective...
Have a nice week-end,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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