Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au> writes: > Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
>> + <p> >> + In all cases, Files is a multiline field. The first line of >> + the field value (the part on the same line as <tt>Files:</tt>) >> + is always empty. The content of the field is expressed as >> + continuation lines, one line per file. Each line must be >> + indented by one space and contain a number of sub-fields, >> + separated by spaces, as described below. >> </p> > Is this a more general pattern that could be described in one place, and > referenced from multiple parts of the policy? I would like to see some > of the ‘debian/control’ fields, such as the dependency fields, permitted > (though not required) to use this multi-line-with-first-line-empty > syntax. Well, any field that can span multiple lines with no special syntax is *allowed* to do this, including the dependency fields in debian/control. Description and Changes in *.changes are also required to use this syntax. We should probably use the same language for those fields as well. I'm not quite sure how to organize Policy in a useful way so that this description is separated out. (Checksums-Sha1 and Checksums-Sha256 are also required to use this syntax, but Policy doesn't, yet, document them.) Really, our fields are kind of a mess. Not enough so that I'd support completely redoing the control files or anything, but the number of places where we use fields with the same name but different syntax in different files is unfortunate. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
