The details tab for any given package shows the package description without the first character. For example, 0ad's description is: "real-time strategy game of ancient warfare..." , but it's printed as "eal-time strategy game of ancient warfare..." OS: neon User Editon 5.9
Created attachment 104953 [details] Screenshot of muon, showing only short description, missing 1st character
Created attachment 104954 [details] Screenshot of muon, showing long description as expected
I get the same behaviour. Specifically, what happens for the vast majority of packages is that, in the area that should display the long description from the deb file, Muon displays the short description again, minus the leading character. (The boilerplate statement regarded Canonical support is appended as normal.) There are some exceptions; on my system KDevelop-Python and Minuet display the long description as expected, for example. I am not familiar with the code, but it looks to me as though whatever function is populating the long description box is taking the deb description field and splitting it into the short and long portions like this: * char 1, line 1 * chars 2+, line 1 instead of: * line 1 * lines 2+ I am running Muon 5.6.0 on KDE neon User Edition 5.9 (Plasma 5.9.4, Frameworks 5.32.0). I do not get this issue on my other machine running Kubuntu 16.04.
On further investigation, I found the trigger for this problem lies outside Muon. If I would run, say: apt-cache show kdevelop it would display only the first line of the description: Description: integrated development environment for KDE The same command on my Kubuntu machine shows the full description: Description-en_GB: integrated development environment for KDE KDevelop is an easy to use integrated development environment...(etc.) This tipped me off that the problem lay with apt not downloading translations. Sure enough, I found that with the default KDE neon install, the file /etc/apt/apt.conf contains the line Acquire::Languages "none"; Removing that line and doing a 'sudo apt update' brought down the full descriptions, and now Muon is displaying them just fine. If this is a valid bug against muon, it is in reference to its handling of missing/incomplete package descriptions.
Hi Alex, thank you for your detailed report and analysis. The missing character bug has been fixed in libqapt 3.0.3, that's where Muon gets the descriptions from. As you found out it depends on translations being available or not. The cause is the same for incomplete descriptions, but I don't see any easy or useful way for Muon to work around that. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 316650 ***