Support for 'short description' in package.xml / Bloom?

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Are you talking about the description in the debs themselves?

I think this was removed from the package.xml spec because it was pretty much always not set or completely redundant to the description.

I could conceive that we use an approach like doxygen, where the first line, if followed by a new line character, is considered the brief.

In fact, the Debian guidelines for control files says the first line is considered the brief:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-poli...

The bloom template simply plops the whole description down in the description: field, so if you put a new line after the first line in your package's description, it should get processed by debs as the brief:

https://github.com/ros-infrastructure...

There are some other interesting rules in there, which we could take advantage of, perhaps bloom could intelligently change the contents of the package.xml description to use some of those rules. If you think that is value, please open a ticket to that effect in bloom's tracker.