Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
> Currently, so far as I can see, nothing in the general discussion of the
> syntax of control files prohibits repetition of the same field name in
> one paragraph. For example:
> Package: foo
> Package: bar
> However, I believe this should always be a syntax error. Lintian has a
> check for this:
> Tag: debian-control-with-duplicate-fields
> Severity: serious
> Certainty: certain
> Info: One of the paragraphs of your debian/control contains the same
> field more than once. This can lead to unexpected behaviour in
> <tt>dpkg</tt> and <tt>apt</tt>.
> (I haven't checked the assertion about unexpected behavior) and this
> check is among those that ftpmaster uses to reject packages. I think we
> should prohibit such duplicate fields in Policy as well.
dpkg-dev checks this at build time, so this definitely seems to be the
right move. Here is a patch.
Objections or seconds?
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index 87b9795..99ab0ff 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -2398,6 +2398,11 @@ Package: libc6
</p>
<p>
+ Each paragraph may contain at most one instance of a particular
+ field name.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
Many fields' values may span several lines; in this case
each continuation line must start with a space or a tab.
Any trailing spaces or tabs at the end of individual
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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