Le Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 11:00:54PM +0200, Jakub Wilk a écrit : > * Michael Tautschnig <m...@debian.org>, 2012-10-01, 14:25: > >>By policy, blank lines separate paragraphs, comments are > >>discarded, so we end up with an empty first paragraph. Policy, > >>however, requires that the *first* paragraph contains essential > >>package information (Policy 5.2). > > I'm not convinced by this interpretation the Policy. Common sense > tells me that there's no such thing as "empty paragraph". So the > question is: are empty liens allowed at the beginning of a control > file? I don't see an answer to that question in the Policy, > unfortunately.
Indeed, the Policy does not consider that case. This said, the format of the control data files is inspired from the RFC822, which contains the following in its section 4.1: message = fields *( CRLF *text ) ; Everything after ; first null line ; is message body Another important factor for the Policy is the "current practice". Before proposing that empty lines are allowed or disallowed in control data files, I think that we would need to survey what is done in Debian. For instnace, is gnome-pkg-tools an outlier, are there tools tolerating initial empty lines on purpose, what is the situation for other control data files, etc. 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 Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121001234804.ga12...@falafel.plessy.net