[Dctrl-tools-devel] Bug#525525: Bug#525525: do not separate stanzas with empty lines when showing Description field only

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

[ sorry for the delay, I was on VAC ]

On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 10:53:54AM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> It's not a bug, it's a feature, going waaaaay back to the early versions of
> grep-dctrl.  It is caused by this conditional statement:
>    if (args.num_show_fields > 1) puts("");
> in the output code.  And incidentally, it is independent of the name of the
> single field - I have no idea why you weren't able to reproduce this with
> fields other than Description (I was able to reproduce it with Maintainer,
> too).
> 
> I don't remember why I wrote it like that.  Probably to make it more
> "user friendly", $DEITY help me.

Mmmmmhhh, I surely understand your consistency argument, but I confess
I really don't see where the "feature" is.

Actually, you just made me wonder whether APT and friends would digest
stanzas not separated by empty lines (which technically are not
required by the mbox format whereas they are always there in
practice). I just want to standardize on the "APT" lingo, if it
requires the empty lines, I see outputting it when at least one
multi-line field is present as the only reasonable behavior.

Alternatively, you can implement one behavior consistently (one of:
always output the empty line, no matter the multi-line-ness of
involved fields, or never output it) and add an option to change
it. After all, what is annoying is the non consistency.

Many thanks for your reply,
Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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