Bug#932696: Please document Haskell team style Vcs-Git sytax [and 1 more messages]

[Russ Allbery]

Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> SGTM.  We can specify that [ ] contains optional information.  I guess
> that is why that syntax was chosen...

> Then critical information which *should* cause an old parser to fail
> can also be added.

> So the overall syntax is roughly

>   <url> [ " -b " <branch> ] [ " " <other critial information> ]
>      [ " [" ( <path> | <key> "=" <value> "; " )* "]" ]

> We can say that it's <key> if it has "=" before any "/".  Then paths
> containing = are expressable as ./foo=bar

This is a little more complicated than I'd like (we have a few too many
different ad hoc parsers and novel grammars in Debian), but I think it's
unavoidable at this point without breaking backward compatibility in ways
that aren't worth it.

So, looks good to me.  Next step is for someone to get a chance to write
the language.  (I'll tag the bug accordingly.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>