Bug#108416: Format of short description should be mandated

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

(Sorry to come in late and revive this; I was out of town.)

Since there doesn't seem to be consensus on this topic, I thought I'd
weigh in with my opinion (worth every cent you paid for it). I like most
of Branden's proposals/points/guidelines, but none[1] of them belong in
policy. This is the beginning of the creep into over specification. The
contents of a short description have no effect on the operation of the
user's system, or interaction with other packages, etc. The problems
with short (and long) descriptions are almost entirely content problems,
not format problems, and better served by an individual bug reports with
a suggested improvement.

I *do* think that whoever is maintaining "how to make debian packages"
tutorials would be well advised to include or reference Branden's write
up, though. Except for one thing:

On 11-Aug-01, 18:56 (CDT), Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote: 
> A package's short description should not:
> [snip]
>  2. refer to the names of any other software packages, protocl names,
>     standards, or specifications in their canonical forms (if one
>     exists)

This should be in the "A package's short description should:" section,
right?  Or include the word "except" between "specifications" and "in".
And "protocol" is misspelled.

Steve

[1] With the possible exception of the "should be less than 80
characters" clause.

-- 
Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>