Looking at the regex the negative look-ahead assertation "(?! )" should probably look for all white-space and not only " ".
Using "perl -p000 -e 's/^(?:Pre-Depends|Depends|Recommends|Suggests|Conflicts|Provides|Replaces|Breaks|Essential):.*?\n(?!\s)//msg' debian/control" will result in
Package: mplayer-nogui
Architecture: any
Section: video
Description: movie player for Unix-like systems
MPlayer plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO,
[...]
Looking at the regex the negative look-ahead assertation "(?! )" should probably look for all white-space and not only " ".
Using "perl -p000 -e 's/^(?: Pre-Depends| Depends| Recommends| Suggests| Conflicts| Provides| Replaces| Breaks| Essential) :.*?\n( ?!\s)// msg' debian/control" will result in
Package: mplayer-nogui
Architecture: any
Section: video
Description: movie player for Unix-like systems
MPlayer plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO,
[...]
which is probably the expected behaviour.