Bonjour Raphaël, Thank you for the feedback. It made me understood that the format can be even simplified. First of all, let me clarify that I do not aim at describing the format of Debian control files, but the proposed format for DEP5, which I propose for DEP3 as well since it is simple and does not require prior experience of Debian control files.
In the informal discussions about DEP5, a popular request was to be allowed to use free-form plain comments. I think that I read such a request in the DEP3 discussion as well. With this goal in mind, I propose that anything that is not in a field is a comment. Then there is no need to define embedded comments, and the empty lines above the first field can be ignored as comments and do not need to be specified. The only drawback is that a comment must not contain lines that look like starting a new field. In my experience with debian/copyright files, this is not a problem. If everything that is not a field is a comment, then there is no need to specify a signal for end of header (lines with spaces only), and if lines with spaces only are allowed, then there is no need anymore for escaping empty lines in field bodies with dot characters, which prettifies the field bodies and simplifies the format. In the case of DEP3, spurious fields could appear if the patch itself is parsed. Nevertheless, this can be solved by specifying that the patch header is extracted by the parser in a way that depends on the format of the patch, and that only the extracted patch header is fully compliant with the pseudo RFC-822 format described below. This also has the advantage of moving out the dpatch-specific contorsions from the definition of the format. This would give: Fields are logical elements composed of a field name, followed by a colon, followed by a field body, and terminated by a line feed character. - A field name is composed of printable characters, except colons. - The field body is composed of any character. Leading spaces of the body are ignored. To avoid problems with multi-line values, any line feed character must be escaped by following it by a space. The line that contains that space is called a continuation line. - Lines that are not continuation lines and do not start a new field are plain comments. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
