This is related to bug #189026 on debconf. The problem is that leading spaces are eaten both in Default: lines in the templates file, and in the SET command in the debconf protocol. We really need a solution that deals with all of these, and right now using escaped characters (\t, \n, \s or '\ ') strikes me as slightly better than quoted strings as it is easier to deal with, generalises to any problem character and supports newlines, and less likely to break existing stuff.
But it's a big change, and a change likely to break stuff (anything with a literal "\n" in a question value for example), and one that we don't want to get wrong if we make the change because fixing it later would be very painful. Since it involves the debconf spec, it will need to go through the policy modification process anyway, which will be slow. Non-breaking spaces seem like a more palatable workaround from this new perspective. So we're back to why does cdebconf blank out entire lines if they start with a NBSP and it's not at a utf-8 terminal? Should this just be worked around by hacking on cdebconf to translate NBSP to spaces before display? -- see shy jo
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