On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote: > Charles Plessy <ple...@debian.org> writes: >> Le Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 10:24:57AM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit : >> >>> In fields where the value may not span multiple lines, the amount >>> of whitespace in the field body is not significant. Any amount of >>> whitespace is equivalent to a single space. Whitespace must not >>> appear inside names (of packages, architectures, files, or anything >>> else) or version numbers, or between the characters of >>> multi-character versoin relationships. > >> I still have difficulties to understand the meaning of this paragraph, >> and to what fields it applies. Is it just specifiying that the parser, >> in the case of fields that allow continuation lines, can be either >> intructed to replace all white spaces and newlines by single spaces, or >> to leave the value as it is, including the new lines? > > No, it's really trying to say that the amount of whitespace isn't > significant. I'm not sure how else to explain it. That's one of those > precise terms of art for which there isn't really an acceptable synonym, > at least not that I can think of. Replacing all whitespace with a single > space is one of the things that you can do *because* the amount of > whitespace is not significant, but it's not an equivalent statement.
It might be more *precise* to say that the field contains a series of whitespace-delimited tokens, but I don't know if that would be more *understandable*. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
