Charles Plessy <[email protected]> writes: > 1) The Policy may change independantly of the DEP.
> I think that the DEP should indicate the version of the Policy it refers > to, not only in the – however improbable – case that a change is > introduced to the syntax of Debian control files, but also in case > editorial changes of the Policy modify the chapter or section > number. Another workaround would be to cite the section's title. This raises something else I was thinking about. I believe that technical DEPs, if adopted, should move into the debian-policy package for further maintenance. We have a well-defined method for maintaining technical documents, plus an active team to take care of editorial changes like cross-reference information like this, and I think it would be appropriate for these documents. (Note: I don't mean including it in the Policy document itself or making DEP-5 required or even recommended, just maintaining it as part of the debian-policy package with the same change procedure.) > 2) The Policy does not describe the DEP syntax for escaping empty lines. > Policy §5.1 does not describe the mechanism of using a space plus a dot > to escape empty lines in field values, but we can not refer simply to > §5.6.13 (Description) because the DEP-5 License field is verbatim, > whereas the debian/control Description filed requires an additional > space to signal verbatim sections. Yes, this should be described in DEP-5. > [In the end, all this hassle of adding dots in License fields originates > in the fact that debian/control files also separate paragraphs with > liens containing space or tabs only… Why?] It's ambiguous about whether that's actually a paragraph separator or not. There's an open bug about that. But regardless, we'll never say that a line containing only whitespace is part of the field because that's way too fragile. Too many things will delete trailing whitespace automatically, which would corrupt such a format. It's either a paragraph separator or it's a syntax error; Policy isn't very clear about that right now. > 3) License text will contain leading spaces. > In debian/control's Description field, the field value keeps the leading > space of the line, but the description is later wrapped again unless an > extra space signals a verbatim section. > In DEP-5's License fields, the text formatting would be lost if we > word-wrapped the field value. Therefore, if strictly following the > Debian control file format, license texts will contain an extra space, > which is not a problem but is not elegant. I can't imagine how this could possibly matter to anyone. I routinely add or remove extra indentation for licenses when I move them from file to file even without DEP-5. But DEP-5 can certainly say that the leading spaces are not part of the field value. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
