Package: lintian Version: 2.5.84 Severity: wishlist I don't know how well this will work or if it will produce false positives, but inspired by having just reported yet another bug about a package whose short description contained the start of a sentence that continued into the long description, I wonder if Lintian could try to detect that somehow.
One possibility would be to check for a long description that starts with a lowercase letter, other than the case where the long description starts with the package name or a word from the package name. That *might* still produce some false positives, though. If that still produces too many false positives, perhaps it would work to check for a short description that looks like a sentence followed by more words, and *then* a lowercase word starting the description. For instance: Description: words words words. Words words words words words. Words words words. Does that seem plausible? -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages lintian depends on: ii binutils 2.30-16 ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1 ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1 ii dpkg 1.19.0.5 ii file 1:5.33-1 ii gettext 0.19.8.1-6 ii intltool-debian 0.35.0+20060710.4 ii libapt-pkg-perl 0.1.34 ii libarchive-zip-perl 1.60-1 ii libclass-accessor-perl 0.51-1 ii libclone-perl 0.39-1 ii libdpkg-perl 1.19.0.5 ii libemail-valid-perl 1.202-1 ii libfile-basedir-perl 0.07-1 ii libipc-run-perl 0.99-1 ii liblist-moreutils-perl 0.416-1+b3 ii libparse-debianchangelog-perl 1.2.0-12 ii libperl5.26 [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.26.2-2 ii libtext-levenshtein-perl 0.13-1 ii libtimedate-perl 2.3000-2 ii liburi-perl 1.73-1 ii libxml-simple-perl 2.25-1 ii libyaml-libyaml-perl 0.69+repack-1 ii man-db 2.8.3-2 ii patchutils 0.3.4-2 ii perl 5.26.2-2 ii t1utils 1.41-2 ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.3 Versions of packages lintian recommends: pn libperlio-gzip-perl <none> Versions of packages lintian suggests: pn binutils-multiarch <none> ii dpkg-dev 1.19.0.5 ii libhtml-parser-perl 3.72-3+b2 ii libtext-template-perl 1.52-1 -- no debconf information
