Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.84
Severity: wishlist

I don't know how well this will work or if it will produce false
positives, but inspired by having just reported yet another bug about a
package whose short description contained the start of a sentence that
continued into the long description, I wonder if Lintian could try to
detect that somehow.

One possibility would be to check for a long description that starts
with a lowercase letter, other than the case where the long description
starts with the package name or a word from the package name. That
*might* still produce some false positives, though.

If that still produces too many false positives, perhaps it would work
to check for a short description that looks like a sentence followed by
more words, and *then* a lowercase word starting the description. For
instance:

Description: words words words. Words words
 words words words. Words words words.


Does that seem plausible?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C.UTF-8 
(charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils                          2.30-16
ii  bzip2                             1.0.6-8.1
ii  diffstat                          1.61-1+b1
ii  dpkg                              1.19.0.5
ii  file                              1:5.33-1
ii  gettext                           0.19.8.1-6
ii  intltool-debian                   0.35.0+20060710.4
ii  libapt-pkg-perl                   0.1.34
ii  libarchive-zip-perl               1.60-1
ii  libclass-accessor-perl            0.51-1
ii  libclone-perl                     0.39-1
ii  libdpkg-perl                      1.19.0.5
ii  libemail-valid-perl               1.202-1
ii  libfile-basedir-perl              0.07-1
ii  libipc-run-perl                   0.99-1
ii  liblist-moreutils-perl            0.416-1+b3
ii  libparse-debianchangelog-perl     1.2.0-12
ii  libperl5.26 [libdigest-sha-perl]  5.26.2-2
ii  libtext-levenshtein-perl          0.13-1
ii  libtimedate-perl                  2.3000-2
ii  liburi-perl                       1.73-1
ii  libxml-simple-perl                2.25-1
ii  libyaml-libyaml-perl              0.69+repack-1
ii  man-db                            2.8.3-2
ii  patchutils                        0.3.4-2
ii  perl                              5.26.2-2
ii  t1utils                           1.41-2
ii  xz-utils                          5.2.2-1.3

Versions of packages lintian recommends:
pn  libperlio-gzip-perl  <none>

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
pn  binutils-multiarch     <none>
ii  dpkg-dev               1.19.0.5
ii  libhtml-parser-perl    3.72-3+b2
ii  libtext-template-perl  1.52-1

-- no debconf information

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