Hi, Personally, I have the feeling there is not much we can do here. In the absence of the Description (or Subject) field, it is probably not a DEP-3. Hench there would be nothing to do.
Supposing it is present, the only other thing we can say (assuming it is a DEP-3 patch[2]) either Author/Subejct will be present or Origin will. Unfortunately Origin appears to be a mess of possible forms with a lot of "should" (as in "recommended, but strictly required"). The Author/From field (which may be repeated) would contain the name and the email of the "author" of the patch. Here, DEP-3 does not specific in what way this should (or shouldn't) be encoded. It uses an example conviently similar to the Maintainer field, but in the From field I would expect any email to be valid (e.g. anything accepted by mail programs). The unstructured content and the "duplicate fields in same paragraph" implies writing a new parser (or augmenting the existing one)... for a set of info or pedantic tags... where most of the time we are dealing with free-form or vaguely specified content. Personally, with the limited time I am currently putting into Lintian, I would prefer to spend it on important issues or trivial/well-defined issues. You are more than welcome to write a (set of) patch(es) for it, but if this is left to me I will probably end up tagging it wontfix. ~Niels [1] Possible exception being spell-checking. Though we have to account for the patch being a "typo-fix". We probably want to allow a typo in that case like we do in the changelog. [2] Personally I vaguely recall having patches with only a Description field in some of my packages. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
