Dear dpkg-dev developers,

One feature that is deeply missed, and which disappered when we moved to
source only uploads, is the listing of binary package descriptions in
the email to debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org.

The emails used to have a section like this, listing the short
description of each binary package:

  Description:
   gdm        - GNOME Display Manager

I used this to see if a package I never heard about could be interesting
to check out or not.  After we moved to source only uploads to unstable,
there is no Description section any more in the emails, and it is a lot
harder to guess what the odd packages are useful for.

The email content is simply the uploaded .changes file.

Would it be possible to adjust the .changes generator to include the
description of all binary packages listed in d/control, even if none of
them are included in the upload?

hi,

(leaving full context for debian-policy@l.d.o)

IMO this would only be a clumsy workaround (esp for packages with many binary
package) and we should rather fix the cause:

#963524 debian-policy: Binary and Description fields not mandatory in .changes on source-only uploads
#998165 debian-policy: document and allow Description in the source paragraph
#998282 Please make Section a required field for the source paragraph in d/control

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=998165#19 is a nice example
how this would work in practice.

[Holger Levsen]

Not sure a source package description will provide the information I
wish for, which is simply to get a similar list to what we used to get
before source only upload became popular.  An example from 2010 is
<URL:https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2010/01/msg00000.html>:

  Description:
   logcheck   - mails anomalies in the system logfiles to the administrator
   logcheck-database - database of system log rules for the use of log checkers
   logtail    - Print log file lines that have not been read (deprecated)