Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.5.6.0
Severity: normal
Recently I was looking at a package that one of my applicants created,
and in its description, it had a list of features. However, it looked
awful in dselect. I remembered that I read it somewhere about how
Descriptions should be formatted to look correctly under dselect, and
supposedly other frontends.
Thanks to Martin Michlmayr, the mystery is now solved: it was
mentioned in section 7.1 of the old packaging-manual.
Since it is very important to have proper descriptions, I would like
to see most of that section integrated into policy. If it doesn't
belong there, feel free to reassign this bug to the proper place,
maybe developers-reference..
For reference, here is the mentioned section:
7.1. Types of formatting line in the extended description
---------------------------------------------------------
* Those starting with a single space are part of a paragraph.
Successive lines of this form will be word-wrapped when
displayed. The leading space will usually be stripped off.
* Those starting with two or more spaces. These will be displayed
verbatim. If the display cannot be panned horizontally the
displaying program will linewrap them `hard' (ie, without taking
account of word breaks). If it can they will be allowed to trail
off to the right. None, one or two initial spaces may be
deleted, but the number of spaces deleted from each line will be
the same (so that you can have indenting work correctly, for
example).
* Those containing a single space followed by a single full stop
character. These are rendered as blank lines. This is the
_only_ way to get a blank line - see below.
* Those containing a space, a full stop and some more characters.
These are for future expansion. Do not use them.
