Check-Script: description Author: Christian Schwarz Abbrev: des Type: binary, udeb Unpack-Level: 1 Tag: package-has-no-description Severity: serious Certainty: certain Info: The binary package does not have a "Description:" control field. Tested: empty Tag: description-synopsis-is-empty Severity: serious Certainty: certain Info: The first line in the "Description:" is empty. Tag: extended-description-is-empty Severity: serious Certainty: certain Status: untested Info: The extended description (the lines after the first line of the "Description:" field) is empty. Tag: extended-description-is-probably-too-short Severity: minor Certainty: possible Ref: devref 6.2.1, devref 6.2.3 Info: The extended description (the lines after the first line of the "Description:" field) is only one or two lines long. The extended description should provide a user with enough information to decide whether they want to install this package, what it contains, and how it compares to similar packages. One or two lines is normally not enough to do this. Tag: description-contains-invalid-control-statement Severity: serious Certainty: certain Info: The description contains a line starting with a dot (.). This is not allowed. Ref: policy 5.6.13 Tag: description-too-long Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The first line of the "Description:" must not exceed 80 characters. Ref: policy 3.4.1 Tag: description-starts-with-package-name Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The first line of the "Description:" should not start with the package name. For example, the package foo should not have a description like this: "foo is a program that...". Ref: policy 3.4.1 Tag: description-contains-tabs Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The package "Description:" must not contain tab characters. Ref: policy 5.6.13 Tag: description-starts-with-leading-spaces Severity: normal Certainty: possible Info: The package "Description:" starts with leading spaces. Usually, leading spaces are used to switch "verbatim display" on (i.e., lines are not wrapped) so this might be a bug in the package. Tag: possible-unindented-list-in-extended-description Severity: normal Certainty: possible Info: The package "Description:" contains an unindented line which starts with a dash (-) or asterisk (*). If this was meant to be a list of items these lines need to be indented (dselect would word-wrap these lines otherwise). Ref: policy 5.6.13 Tag: description-is-debmake-template Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The synopsis or the extended description just says "Missing", which is a template provided by debmake. Tag: description-is-dh_make-template Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The synopsis or the extended description has not been changed from the template provided by dh_make. Tag: description-contains-dh-make-perl-template Severity: normal Certainty: certain Info: The extended description contains the statement that it was automagically extracted by dh-make-perl. Please check the description for correctness and usefulness and remove the dh-make-perl statement to signal that you have done so. Tag: description-synopsis-might-not-be-phrased-properly Severity: normal Certainty: possible Info: The synopsis (first line in the package "Description:" field, the short description) ends with a full stop "." character. This is not necessary, as the synopsis doesn't need to be a full sentence. It is recommended that a descriptive phrase is used instead. . Note also that the synopsis is not part of the rest of the "Description:" field. Ref: policy 3.4.1 Tag: description-synopsis-is-duplicated Severity: important Certainty: certain Info: The first line of the extended Description: should not repeat the synopsis exactly. This indicates that either the synopsis is badly formed or that the extended description has been wrongly copied and pasted. Ref: policy 3.4.2 Tag: extended-description-line-too-long Severity: normal Certainty: certain Info: One or more lines in the extended part of the "Description:" field have been found to contain more than 80 characters. For the benefit of users of 80x25 terminals, it is recommended that the lines do not exceed 80 characters. Ref: policy 3.4.1 Tag: description-contains-homepage Severity: normal Certainty: certain Info: The extended description contains a "Homepage:" pseudo-header following the old Developer's Reference recommendation. As of 1.14.6, dpkg now supports Homepage: as a regular field in debian/control. This header should be moved from the extended description to the fields for the relevant source or binary packages. Tag: spelling-error-in-description Severity: normal Certainty: certain Info: Maemian found a spelling or capitalization error in the package description. Maemian has a list of common misspellings that it looks for. It does not have a dictionary like a spelling checker does. It is particularly picky about spelling and capitalization in package descriptions since they're very visible to end users. Tag: description-contains-duplicated-word Severity: normal Certainty: possible Info: The description contains a duplicated word. Usually this is a mistake, or at least an awkward phrasing. Tag: using-first-person-in-description Severity: minor Certainty: possible Info: You should avoid the use of first person ("I will do this..." or "We recommend..."). The computer is not a person and the description does not speak for the maintainer or maintainers. Instead, use a more neutral construction and try to rephrase into factual statements about the package. . For example, rather than saying "I don't recommend this package if you are short on memory," say something like "this package is not suitable for low-memory systems." Tag: description-possibly-contains-homepage Severity: wishlist Certainty: wild-guess Info: This package has no Homepage field but has a URL in the description and wording that might indicate this is the package Homepage. If it is, add a Homepage control field containing it rather than mentioning it in the package description.