Dear Maintainer,

When a package build invokes ‘dh_elpa_test’, if the package's Source stanza
(in the template source control file) has a “Description” field,
‘dh_elpa_test’ crashes with an error:

=====
$ cat debian/control
Source: inform-mode
Maintainer: Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>
Section: editors
Build-Depends:
    dh-elpa,
    debhelper-compat (= 14)
Standards-Version: 4.7.4
[…]
Description: Emacs major mode for editing Inform 6 source
 ‘inform-mode’ is an Emacs major mode for editing source code in the
 Inform 6 programming language.
[…]
=====

=====
$ dh binary --with elpa
   dh_update_autotools_config
   dh_autoreconf
   dh_elpa_test
Invalid field given (Description) at /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Control.pm line 121.
make: *** [debian/rules:18: binary] Error 255
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules binary subprocess failed with exit status 2
=====

The Description field in the Source package control stanza is normal, as
documented in the manual page ‘deb-src-control(5)’. This field, and any
other valid field in the template source control file, should be handled
correctly when running ‘dh_elpa_test’.

Hi Ben,

Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> writes:

This looks like a limitation in libdebian-source-perl, where
Debian::Control::Stanza::Source does not support "Description" field.
The corresponding Debian::Control::Stanza::Binary does support it
though, which may be borrowed as a fix.

I have cloned the bug and assigned to libdebian-source-perl package,
which is part of the dh-make-perl source package.