(debian-policy.info)Description

---

Next: Distribution Prev: Version Up: List of fields

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

5.6.13 ‘Description’
--------------------

In a source or binary control file, the ‘Description’ field contains a
description of the binary package, consisting of two parts, the synopsis
or the short description, and the long description.  It is a multiline
field with the following format:

     Description: single line synopsis
      extended description over several lines

The lines in the extended description can have these formats:

   - 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.  The line must
     contain at least one non-whitespace character.

   - Those starting with two or more spaces.  These will be displayed
     verbatim.  If the display cannot be panned horizontally, the
     displaying program will line wrap them “hard” (i.e., 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).  The
     line must contain at least one non-whitespace character.

   - 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.  (1)

   - Those containing a space, a full stop and some more characters.
     These are for future expansion.  Do not use them.

Do not use tab characters.  Their effect is not predictable.

See Note: The description of a package. for further information on
this.

In a ‘.changes’ file, the ‘Description’ field contains a summary of the
descriptions for the packages being uploaded.  For this case, the first
line of the field value (the part on the same line as ‘Description:’) is
always empty.  It is a multiline field, with one line per package.  Each
line is indented by one space and contains the name of a binary package,
a space, a hyphen (‘-’), a space, and the short description line from
that package.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) Completely empty lines will not be rendered as blank lines.
Instead, they will cause the parser to think you’re starting a whole new
record in the control file, and will therefore likely abort with an
error.