Bug#998165: debian-policy: document and allow Description in the source paragraph
Nicholas D Steeves <sten@debian.org> writes:
> The following is only Informational level, but the existence of
> Lintian's "duplicate-long-description" tag suggests that producing
> duplicate bin:Descriptions in bin:libfoo and bin:foo packages is not
> ideal, thus a straight copy from src:Description is not ideal. I'm not
> sure what the best way to solve this is, but substvar looks like a good
> solution. Alternatively, simply appending "\n\n$binary_pkg\n" to the
> src:Description when generating the bin:pkg Descriptions would do the
> trick. Maybe there's an even better way?
What's wrong with duplicate descriptions? I think we need to answer that
question first before deciding whether the Lintian tag is telling us
anything meaningful.
Policy has a fairly good description of the intention of the package
description:
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#s-descriptions
I think the additional caveat, and the primary place where I've seen
packages duplicate the same long description, is that there are a bunch of
packages in Debian that are essentially never installed directly by a
systems administrator, and thus for which the package description doesn't
matter a ton if there's nothing else to describe (like conflicts or
dependencies). Library packages are a typical example; they're pulled in
as dependencies.
I personally tend to add a sentence to the top of the binary package
description saying something like "Provides the shared libraries for foo"
or "Provides architecture-independent support files used by foo" and then
put the shared long description in the second paragraph, which wouldn't be
flagged by Lintian. But I'm not sure the practice of putting "- shared
library" in the synopsis and using the same long description is all that
bad or something we should worry about discouraging.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: