Re: DEP-5: general file syntax
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> writes:
>> * Have one copyright statement per Copyright field, and have multiple
>> instances of the field.
> This is my preference, and what I've been doing in my packages.
Unfortunately, this creates real challenges for parsers. I've written a
few RFC 5322 parsers, particularly for Usenet, and allowing repetition of
headers always causes headaches in representation. You end up having to
add another layer of data structure, with corresponding changes to
everything that consumes information from the parser, if you don't want to
throw away information. It's also a divergence from the Debian control
file format, which allows only one instance of a field per stanza,
probably for much the same reason.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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