Re: Package description field
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Christian Schwarz wrote:
>
> > The Debian packaging manual contains a complete chapter (chapter 7) about
> > the description fields. Please check this out first. If you discover any
> > points that are not covered by this chapter, please drop me or Klee a
> > note.
>
> Well first off, let me say that I am pretty sure that about 20% of the
> packages blatently misconform to this. I was forced to put a disturbing
> number of special cases into the parser, stuff like:
> - Expand tabs to 8 aligned spaces
> - Allows a blank line with no dot but a number of spaces to be the same
> as a ' .' combination <sigh>
> - Handling of misindeted '.' lines
>
> The manual does not specify any sort of way to format lists, I would
> suggest adding some comments that a line starting with a '*' or '-' will
> be considered a list. Fruthermore a */- indicates a paragraph break. Also,
> it would be good to forbid the use of ---- made lines (like that ssh
> example) and to clarify that paragraphs MUST have a empty dot line between
> them (like the ssh example didn't do). I would also forbid the use of
> other letters for bullets, 'axe' uses 'o' :< 'Dialog' is another example
> that really messes things up..
>
> I use a very different formatting routine than dselect, what dselect does
> won't really cut it for cramming these things into 20 characters :<
>
> Checking for the most obvious violations should probably go in your new
> checker script too..
Richard is already working on a script to check the descriptions and is
currently running "ispell" over everything. Perhaps he should comment on
this.
Cheers,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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