Bug#108416: Format of short description should be mandated

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Branden Robinson wrote:
> Since you're fond of statistics, here are some for woody/main/i386:
> 
> $ grep '^Description:' Packages | wc -l
>    6126
> $ grep '^Description:' Packages | sort | uniq | wc -l
>    5848
> $ grep '^Description:' Packages | fold -w 93 | wc -l
>    6126

Unsuprising, since policy already says this:
     
     The single line synopsis should be kept brief - certainly under 80
     characters.

Lintian already checks for descriptions > 80 characters (and those > 60
as well, iirc). (I like the idea of surtracting the package name length
from description BTW.)

And I filed bugs on all packages that violated this rule within the past
year.

> Would that all the "musts" we actually *have* in policy could claim such
> success...

I guess it says something for policy not needing to be used as a stick;
a mere 'should' has clearly sufficed.

-- 
see shy jo