Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> writes: > 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.
So the root cause is reusing the upstream description? i think that is a suboptimal idea - the upstream description is not designed for the same audience as the debian package, and you shoukd expect to have to edit it. the upstream text will likely assume eg - jargon specific to the package - familiarity with implementation language - generic linux, rather thsn debian - local install rather thzn system wide i would suggest that it's a minor bug, as most debian package descriptions are not very good in other ways. but removing the lintian warning to encourage reuse of upstream text is not ideal! you czn always ignore lintian, right?
