Charles Plessy <ple...@debian.org> writes: > In the spec, the word "paragraph" is only used in the specified context, > so I always felt that there is no ambiguity. But of course, it can > create opportunities for misunderstanding when discussing about the > spec. So point taken about "paragraph", although interestingly, the > Simple English definition of "paragraph" is quite spot on if one would > replace "sentence" with "field": ”one or more sentences that are written > together with no line breaks separating them. Usually they are > connected by a single idea.” > (<https://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/paragraph>)
> The use of "paragraph" in the current spec is also consistent with > Chapter 5 of the Policy, which also uses the word "paragraph". Right, that's the motivation of this change. It didn't start as being about the copyright file, but about Policy. Guillem was standardizing terminology in dpkg. I don't have a strong opinion about what word we choose. I care more about a few surrounding principles, specifically: * We should use the same terminology when describing the copyright file as when describing Debian control files (and every other deb822 file). * Policy should use the same terminology as dpkg. * I'd prefer we not use the word "paragraph" because we also use that word to talk about normal prose paragraphs in the Description control field, and may similarly need to talk about prose paragraphs in the copyright file. > By the way, in section 5.6.26 of the Policy, the word "stanza" is also > used to mean something else than a "paragraph". Thanks, I think regardless of how we resolve this bug that usage was confusing. It was also using two terms for the same concept in the same section, since earlier the same construction was referred to as a "portion." I've fixed this to use "portion" consistently in this section. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
