debmode

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Jörg Sommer <joerg at alea.gnuu.de> [2006-04-02 13:52]:

> Rafael Laboissiere schrieb am Fri 31. Mar, 08:20 (+0200):
> > File /usr/share/doc/dpkg-dev-el/README.Debian contains a description of
> > these files.
> 
> As far as I could see the main purpose of the modes is coloring. Is this
> all?

I do not think so.  These files define modes for debian/control,
debian/changelog, debian/README, and debian/copyright files.  Besides
syntax highlighting, facilities are defined for each of these modes.
Indeed, they need different ways of indenting paragraphs, inserting
entries, keeping consistency, etc.  

Also, menus are defined, Policy-compliant constructs are checked, and
there is a good interface to the BTS system (in debian-bts-control.el).
There are loads of functions that are defined in these elisp files:

$ dpkg -L dpkg-dev-el | xargs grep defun | wc -l
64

Most of them go far beyond just coloring.

> > I mostly use the debian-changelog-mode, which is extremely handy for
> > inserting new items,
> 
> Why? How does it help you adding new lines with a star in front? ;-)

Okay, I understand your sarcasm, but I find that typing C-c C-a is indeed
handy, as well as these other key-bindings (I use all them all the time):

C-c C-b         debian-changelog-close-bug
C-c C-c         debian-changelog-finalise-and-save
C-c C-d         debian-changelog-distribution
C-c C-e         debian-changelog-unfinalise-last-version
C-c C-f         debian-changelog-finalise-last-version
C-c C-u         debian-changelog-urgency
C-c C-v         debian-changelog-add-version

Cloning all this in JED would be fantastic.

-- 
Rafael