On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 15:49 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 09:57:11PM +0100, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
[Russ wrote:]
> > > Do all of the various programs that use Vcs fields support newlines in
> > > the field value? This is not a given; Policy says that newlines are
> > > only allowed when specifically permitted by the specification for that
> > > field.
>
> This is no longer the case. Starting from policy 3.7.0 (see
> /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz) all fields
> are:
> - on a logical single line ...
> - ... that can be split over several _physical_ lines
There appears to be some debate as to whether things are quite as clear
cut as that summary from the checklist suggests. :-/ In the discussion
of #372731, for which a fix was applied in Policy 3.7.2.1, Russ
indicated that it was intended to apply to the relationship fields, not
the file in general.
The discussion of #148194, which was the bug referred to in the
checklist entry you mentioned, also explicitly states that only those
fields mentioned in section 7.1 were intended to be affected.
In any case, since Russ wrote the wording in question, I'll assume he
knows what he intended it to mean :-) The current wording obviously
isn't unambiguous though.
> Actually, I'm a bit surprised that it is a problem, because I thought
> the various archive management tools used to normalize on a single
> physical lines all fields.
dpkg-* do, for the fields mentioned in section 7.1. For example,
comparing the Build-Depends, Recommends and Suggests fields of
devscripts in the source package with the results of "apt-cache
show{,src} devscripts" clearly shows that those fields have been
wrapped.
However, "apt-cache showsrc libtie-hash-regex-perl" still shows an
unwrapped Vcs-Browser field, which is what Lintian is complaining about.
Adam
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