Bug#809637: debian/copyright checks fail on upstream filenames containing blanks
Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:
> On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 10:49:04AM +0000, Mike Gabriel wrote:
>> At the moment, we are not able to exactly specify file paths of
>> files/folders containing blanks in debian/copyright when complying with
>> the DEP-5 specs. (I agree that it is indeed uncommon as a developer to
>> use blanks in filenames and that it should be avoided by upstream
>> devs).
>> Suggestions to solve this:
>> (a) allow escaping of blanks somehow (e.g., "\ ")
>> (b) allow quotes for filenames or such
> This should be fixed. Our machine-readable copyright format should not
> be causing us to file bugs to upstream saying "could you rename this
> file that our Debian build process doesn't even use, please?" (e.g.)
> Would it be possible to permit Files: to be a line-based list? Then
> there could be one glob per line, and I think they could contain spaces.
> This avoids introducing new syntax.
I like solution (a), honestly. I think we could just add backslash as an
escape character that escapes anything other than a newline and have the
problem basically go away. It would require a new version of the spec,
though, since it's not backward compatible (although I doubt many files
contained literal backslashes).
Line-based lists is much less backward-compatible, since we break every
debian/copyright file that uses space-separated lists, which is much more
common than having whitespace in filenames.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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