Bug#684503: control.header yields paragraph-separating blank line in debian/control

Michael Tautschnig mt at debian.org
Fri Aug 10 14:50:22 UTC 2012


Package: gnome-pkg-tools
Version: 0.19.3
Severity: important
Justification: breaks policy compliance of other packages

The file control.header ends with an empty blank line. As the contents of that
file is prepended to debian/control for packages making using of
gnome-pkg-tools, this results in

<comments>
<blank line>
<actual debian/control contents>

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).

The current setup breaks at least pbuilder's build-dependency parsing, which
relies on this fact.

If you believe that an empty first paragraph should not be considered a
paragraph, please reassign to policy, asking for clarification that it's the
*first non-empty* paragraph.

Best,
Michael

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