On Wednesday, September 2, 2026 2:35:21 PM Mountain Standard Time Charles Plessy wrote: > Hello everyone! > > I propose that we relax the requirement that short descriptions should > not start with an article. > > I maintain a large number of packages coming from a curated repository > of libraries for the R language. They all come with their own > machine-readable short and long description (in a format inspired by > Debian). > > I routinely update Debian's package metadata in debian/control with the > metadata provided by upstream, so that changes that they make in their > description are applied to Debian, so that we distribute their work > under the description that they chose and think is appropriate. > > Now the problem: some authors start their descriptions with an article. > > Yes, they do. > > And we strongly discourage it in our packages. It is a "should not" in > the Developer's Reference section 6.2.3. > > > https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices > .en.html#the-package-synopsis-or-short-description > > As such, Lintian points at non-compliant packages with an Warning tag. > > > https://lintian.debian.org/tags/description-synopsis-starts-with-article.html > > And lintian-brush and perhaps other packages automagically fix the > broken packages. > > So now, every time I routine-update a package, I replace the package's > description by the one of upstream, because if it is different it may be > because it is new, and then I have extra commits and changelog entries > saying that an error was fixed by removing the first article. Yes, > my changelogs inform our users that we work hard on reducing article > burden on their hard drives and bandwith. It may be easy to fix the > Perl scripts behind the package update to remove {a,an,the,some} from > the package short description but why not be lean with shorter and > simpler code, and trust the language skills or the taste of upstream? > > Do you agree to relax the requirement that short descriptions should not > start with an article?
Personally I think it reads better without an article. I would be in favor of keeping things the way they are. I understand this creates some extra work for your personal workflow. My suggestion would be, instead of automatically replacing the package description, to manually check to see if they are different (or create a script to perform such a check) and only make changes when appropriate. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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