Bug#318576: *-dev: Please include lib* descriptions in lib*-dev / lib*-dbg ditto

[Jakob Bohm <jbj@image.dk>]

Package: xorg-x11
Severity: minor

The X development packages currently have incomplete descriptions such as:

 Header files and a static version of the SM library are provided by this
 package.
 .
 See the libsm6 package for further information.

While this seems to be an increasingly common practice, it appears to be
against policy and even if there is an exception for this, it is certainly
user-unfriendly.

Rationale: Most package selection front ends, including aptitude, only
display the description for the current package.  References to the
descriptions of other packages thus require a rather large number of
keystrokes to read (compared to 0 (zero) for the description of the package
itself).

I respectfully suggest that the phrase "see the XXXX package for further
information" in these cases be replaced by the actual description of that
package.  It may be preferable for this to be done by a script, so future
changes to the description of XXXX are automagically reflected in the -dev
package.

Respectfully


Jakob


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.11jbj3.2.10
Locale: LANG=en_DK.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_DK.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)