Bug#535958: libparse-debcontrol-perl: fails to parse control files with comments

[Jonathan Yu]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Russ Allbery<rra at debian.org> wrote:
> Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is there a reference in policy for this?
>>
>> I've been monitoring recent changes and I haven't come across anything
>> that would suggest that such comments are permitted. However, I might
>> have missed the relevant section of Policy.
>>
>> What is the section number of the Policy that discusses this?
>
> Policy 5.2.  They're permitted only in debian/control, not in other
> control files.
Is there a particular reason why comments can't be used in other
control files? My software (libdebctrl) currently just scans any
RFC822-alike file and considers them the same, which means if I add
functionality to handle comments, it will apply to any debian control
files, not just debian/control.

There is no easy way for me to issue a warning if comments are used in
files other than debian/control, because the Parser part is a "dumb"
parser that just extracts the structure from files with the RFC822
structure.