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. 9

• 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 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.