> Hi, > > On Wed, 03 Oct 2012, Michael Tautschnig wrote: > > By policy, blank lines separate paragraphs, comments are discarded, so we > > end up > > with an empty first paragraph. Policy, however, requires that the *first* > > paragraph contains essential package information (Policy 5.2). > > > > The blank line should be removed or a comment marker should be inserted. > > > > The current setup breaks at least pbuilder's build-dependency parsing, which > > relies on this fact. > > We can certainly change quilt, but IMO it's more of a bug in pbuilder than > anything else. Considering something empty to be a paragraph on its own is > weird. > > The first non-empty non-comment line ought to start the first paragraph. > Just because you have an empty line doesn't mean that there should be > something before it. >
Sorry, I think I should have included a pointer to the discussion on debian-devel [1] as well. If we stick close to RFC822 than a blank line AFAIK does have a meaning and must not be ignored. But we might as well just agree that we want a more human and natural interpretation of "paragraphs" and amend policy accordingly. For now, however, I'm seeing only a small number of packages make use of such a blank line (see also one of the messages in [1] for data), hence it seems to be worth fixing. Best, Michael [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/10/msg00026.html
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