Re: Bug#555743: dpkg-gencontrol: add support for Description:-s in the Source package stanza

[Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> The sensible answer is putting this information in the .dsc and thus in
> the Sources files. But it means that the file would get somewhat bigger
> and it might meant again supplementary changes in the infrastructutre if
> people want to see those descriptions translated (but I'm not convinced
> we need translations on Sources, users of those are mostly developers
> contrary to Packages).

 While that seems sensible, I wonder whether it would make sense to
 include the information in Packages.gz instead.  There's a high level
 use case which is not too nicely covered at the moment: if one upgrades
 with a graphical package management tools displaying progress of the
 upgrade, it would typically show which package is being upgraded with
 its description, but you typically upgrade all binary packages from the
 same source at the same time, so in the list of packages to update,
 you'd likely see "The GTK+ graphical user interface library"
 (libgtk2.0-0), "The programs for the GTK+ graphical user interface
 library" (libgtk2.0-bin), "Common files for the GTK+ graphical user
 interface library" (libgtk2.0-common) while it would probably make
 sense to only offer a single entry for the software bundle being
 updated, i.e. for all binary packages provided by the same source, with
 a nice description.

 Now that use case still has a flaw in usability in that even per source
 package descriptions wouldn't mean much to non-developers, so it's
 probably a minor improvement in package managers not worth the effort
 of changing infrastucture etc.

-- 
Loïc Minier