On Thu, 11 Jun 2026, Ian Jackson wrote:n > Package: bugs.debian.org > > tl;dr: > Please display the whole designated "summary" message, at the top of > the page, as if it were the first message in the conversation. (And > then again, in its proper place in the chronological order.) > > It would be nice if there was a way to control (and amend) what shows > up at the start of a bug. There's the existing "summary" feature is > very limited: it can only display a single, unformatted, paragraph.
This is partially because of implementation details; summary is a control field and so it's easiest if it's an unformatted paragraph.[1] [And partly to force people to really summarize the details of the bug (the problem) and the summarize the outlook (how they're going to fix it).] One compromise would be to continue with the summary and outlook paragraphs, but also track the specific message that set the summary or the outlook so you could link to an "expanded" summary/outlook. Another alternative would be to do away with the summary/outlook paragraph entirely, and instead use them to pin a specific message to the bug at the top (in addition to where it would go chronologically). 1: I'm not sure if we've defined how multiple paragraphs get parsed in the control parser. I assume we'd ideally follow debian/control and use periods for extension, but I'm not sure if the existing parsers actually do. -- Don Armstrong https://www.donarmstrong.com I shall require that [a scientific system's] logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience. -- Sir Karl Popper _Logic of Scientific Discovery_ ยง6
