Bug#501927: Bug#501930: Bug#501927: debian_bundle fails with empty lines containing a space

[Bill Allombert]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 12:10:54AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 07:26:59PM +0200, Siegfried Gevatter (RainCT) wrote:
> > Further, PackageFile fails if there is more than one empty line. Eg.,
> > http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/revu1-incoming/ampache-0708220100/ampache-3.3.3.5-dfsg/debian/control
> > 
> > IMHO those cases should be handled well even if debian-policy didn't
> > allow it, as I've found *hundreds* of files that can't be parsed, and
> > that only on REVU... And robustness can't hurt :).
> 
> Nope, I'm against such an argument.

Agreed: Robustness means rejecting malformed input with an error.

> In fact, in this specific case, I've been very surprised of not
> finding in the policy an explicit reference to RFC822 [1]. A lot of
> implementation I've seen around of Packages/Sources file do use legacy
> RFC822 libraries, having that practice written in policy would be
> helpful (note that at that point, whether spaces are accepted or not
> will depend entirely on the RFC822 standard).

What it is worth: RFC822 only allows a single empty line as delimiter between
the header and the body of a message: this allows the body to start with
an empty line.

RFC822 does not document the mbox format.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.