Re: [DEP5] Format of Copyright header
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> On the other hand, while a "formatted text" field type *may* be reflowed
> for display, is there any software doing that today wrt DEP5? Maybe
> it's enough to rely on the absence of such formatting in DEP5 parsers
> for the time being; if and when something starts to care about
> formatting the Copyright field, we can always scan the archive to detect
> files that look like they'll wind up formatted poorly.
> And of course, anyone who cares about formatting to this degree can
> always add that extra space at the front of the line. I notice, in
> fact, that all our examples of multi-line Copyright: fields in the draft
> already do this.
So the suggestion is to make it formatted text and recommend that the
whole field be pre-formatted text (indicated by two leading spaces)?
Hm, yes, that would work and is probably the simplest.
It occurs to me that an alternative would be to say that line-based lists
support something akin to RFC 5322 continuation semantics: if a line
starts with two or more spaces, it's taken as a continuation of the
previous line. Then you could do:
Copyright: 2001 Russ Allbery
2004, 2005, 2011
The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
and have that considered two "lines", one of which has a continuation
line. That would preserve the structured semantics, if anyone cares about
them, at the cost of introducing new syntax to line-based lists that isn't
supported by the other control fields that use line-based lists (like
Files or the checksum fields).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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