Cargo crates have a “description” field, which provides a detailed description of the crate. Some crates just fill in a short sentence or sentence fragment, while others provide a detailed multi-line description.
For the purposes of packaging Cargo crates for Linux distributions, I’d like to generate an appropriate package description. Both the .deb and .rpm package formats provide both a “summary”/“short description” that fits on one line, and a “long description” with multiple lines. A one-line summary makes sense in other contexts as well. I’d like to have some more useful metadata to construct that from, without having to attempt to parse out a short description from “description” or invent one downstream.
I’d like to propose extending Cargo metadata to include a “summary” field for a short description, limited to no more than 60 characters (allowing enough room to add things like the package name or a tag like " - source" without passing 80).
The existing “description” field can continue to provide an unrestricted long description. “description” would become optional for packages with a “summary”, if they don’t want to provide any more detail beyond the summary. For backward compatibility, “summary” would remain optional.
Does this seem reasonable?