> If I can express a personal thought, I cannot understand either the meaning,
> the motivation, or the possible usefulness of abandoning a simple,
> intuitively understandable format, easily parsable by row and space-separated
> fields, to move to a "modern" format (sic!) which has nothing better and
> which is just a useless waste of time and effort.
>
> Regards
> alexus

Alexus, I am sympathetic to your position, but when I initially
looked into the DEB822 standard I encounted a description of the
problems that it solved.

"Problems with the One-Line-Style Format begin when parsing
entries via machine. Traditional, optionless entries are
relatively simple to parse, as each different portion of the
entry is separated with a space. With options, however, this is
no longer the case. The presence of options causes there to be
no, 1, or multiple segments of configuration between the type
declaration and the URI. Additionally, APT sources support a
variety of URI schemas, with the capability for extensions to add
additional schemas on certain configurations. Thus, supporting
modern, optioned One-Line-Style Format source entries requires
use of either regular expressions or multi-level parsing in order
to adequately parse the entry. Further compounding this support
is the fact that One-Line-Style Format entries can have one or
more components, preventing parsing of sources backwards from the
end towards the front.


--

     Haines Brown