Felix Lechner <felix.lech...@lease-up.com> writes:
> The installable stanzas in d/control (called "binary package paragraphs"
> in policy) inherit the Section field from the source paragraph. There is
> no reason to provide inheritance the other way around.
Huh, this pointed out to me that I don't know what the current behavior
is. I think I've always put a Section field in the first stanza and then
overridden it as necessary, or at least I don't remember thinking about
this before.
The current Policy description of the Section field is rather cryptic:
This field specifies an application area into which the package has
been classified. See Sections.
When it appears in the debian/control file, it gives the value for the
subfield of the same name in the Files field of the .changes file. It
also gives the default for the same field in the binary packages.
I understand what it's trying to say, but that's a very mechanical
definition that isn't clear about the relationship between the Section
field in the source stanza and the Section field in the binary stanzas.
(It also claims Section is about an "application area," a term that I
don't think we use anywhere else in Policy.)
So, what happens today if you put Section in a binary stanza but not in
the source stanza? Is it inherited from the binary stanza by the source
stanza (I agree that seems weird)? If so, from which binary stanza is it
inherited, if there are several? The definition of the Files field
implies that the section may just be - in some cases.
The current documentation certainly seems inadequate, although I'd like to
understand what the behavior of Debian software is before proposing
alternative wording.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
