--rpm-summary and --description not working as expected

[ccaneke]

Using the --rpm-summary and --description causes three things:

• The description starts from the second line instead of the first (don't know if this is intentional).
• Similar to the above, instead of being located in the 2nd column the description is in the first column and there is no second column (this may not be a problem since it is just a style difference)
• It introduces artefacts (i.e. a dot between the two paragraphs) as shown in the example below

  Examples:

  Using the command: --description "$(printf "long_string_with_\n_backslash escapes ")" gives the following

Summary     : High-level, high-performance dynamic language for technical computing
Description :
Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language
for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of
other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated
compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an
extensive mathematical function library. The library, largely written
in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran
libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing.
 .
This package only contains the essential parts of the julia environment:
the julia executable and the standard library.

[jordansissel]

Based on reading the fpm code history, it is intentional that blank lines are emitted by fpm's rpm template as being . instead of blank lines:

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/blob/8f6f285271550a82bfb61e8e810156e702c0cbaf/templates/rpm.erb#L102-L105

The code has a comment explaining that this is because rpmbuild will fail if a description has a blank line.

However, if I test this on a modern-ish Linux (Fedora 23), it appears to accept blank lines in the %description field.

i don't know what kind of breaking change it would be to disable this, though.

[jordansissel]

The description starts from the second line instead of the first

This is the output of rpm on an official/upstream package from Fedora itself:

% rpm -q gd --info | grep -A2 Description
Description :
The gd graphics library allows your code to quickly draw images
complete with lines, arcs, text, multiple colors, cut and paste from

The description starting on the rpm -q --info output on the 2nd line after 'Description' appears to be normal.