James A. Treacy wrote: > In section 7 of the Debian Packaging Manual it is stated: > > Every package should also have an extended description. > > I just wanted clarification on whether the 'should' is intentional > or whether it should be 'must'. As the package descriptions are > important it should be mandatory that every package provide one.
The policy manual seems to use `should' and `must' interchangeably for mandatory things and `should usually' for optional things. The strongest example of a mandatory `should' is in section 3.1.2: As mandated by the FSSTND no package should place any files in `/usr/local', either by putting them in the filesystem archive to be unpacked by dpkg or by manipulating them in their maintainer scripts. Richard Braakman