Re: Package description field
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..
Thanks,
Jason
Deity
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