The texlive-latex-extra package description has too many blank lines,
making it too long:

Description: TeX Live: LaTeX additional packages
 A very large collection of add-on packages for LaTeX.
 .
 This package includes the following CTAN packages:
 .
 2up --
 .
 ESIEEcv -- Curriculum vitae for French use.
 .
 GS1 -- Typeset EAN barcodes using TeX rules, only.
 .
 HA-prosper -- Patches and improvements for prosper.
 .
 Tabbing -- Tabbing with accented letters.
 .
 a0poster -- Support for designing posters on large paper.
 .
 a4wide -- "Wide" a4 layout.
 .
 a5comb -- Support for a5 paper sizes.
 .
[...]

More than 1900 lines in total!

It may also be better to just give the CTAN package names, without
their description, and even that may be too much: using the Debian
package description may not be the best way to search for a CTAN
package anyway.

Note: other texlive-* packages also have these annoying blank lines
in their description.

Hi Vincent,

what is "too long"? For what?

That is on purpose to help the translators.
Translation units are paragraphs, thus to make work for translators
easy we followed the suggestion of the translators in this way.

Why, what is the problem you are having with the long descriptions?

I *myself* use apt-cache search quite often to find a CTAN package
or a feature in this way.

So I am quite sure that this is a wontfix. If you want, you can
take up the discussion with the translator team.

All the best

Norbert

For "dpkg -s" output, and any other method that also provides the
description. These blank lines waste space, requiring more scrolling.

Moreover, with "dpkg -s", as the description comes at the end, this
long description "hides" the other information from "dpkg -s", unless
a pager is used, but I assume that the end user doesn't expect so much
output.

The package description is for the end user, not for the translators.
If there is a technical problem for the translators, then it should
be solved without annoying the end user.

See above.

IMHO, a better tool should be provided; "apt-cache search" does not
output the CTAN packages with their descriptions matching the request.
And if the user just wants the Debian package corresponding to some
CTAN package, there's apt-file for that.

Similarly, packages usually don't include the list of binaries
they provide (or without the description, like what coreutils
does). I expect the same thing concerning CTAN packages, unless
the list is short.

Expectations are different.

As I said, you are free to take it up with the translators - btw, their work is for the users, too! - I don't have the bug report at hand, but should be easy to find by looking into the changelog.

Good night

Norbert

------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREINING, Norbert                              http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
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Note that this is not just me, but "dpkg -s" clearly expects
a description that is not too long. So, I've sent a mail to
debian-devel ("length of a package extended description").

This is just because they use a poorly-written tool. The unit
shouldn't be the paragraph, but either a paragraph or a list
item or something like that.

But if it is decided that the description shouldn't be that long,
this would also solve the translation problem.

Good morning

Mind that I don't read d-d, too much flame wars there I don't want to get involved. Feel free to Cc the debian-tex list or only me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREINING, Norbert                              http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
------------------------------------------------------------------------