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Write long descriptions for Debain packages created with Netbeans IDE 6.8

This is a very short comment on how to write long descriptions for debian packages created with Netbeans IDE 6.8. Usually when creating debian packages a dpkg-deb programm parses a control file which contains informations like this:

Package: acme
Version: 1.0
Section: web
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Essential: no
Depends: libwww-perl, acme-base (>= 1.2)
Pre-Depends: perl
Recommends: mozilla | netscape
Conflicts: wile-e-coyote
Replaces: sam-sheepdog
Provides: acme
Description: The description can contain free-form text
                describing the function of the program, what
                kind of features it has, and so on.
 More descriptive text.
Here the short description is indicated by "Description: " tag and long description is the paragraph starting with an empty space at the end of the file. When one wants to create a Debian package within Netbeans 6.8 IDE environment, then one determines really fast, that there is no way to add a long description part here. However, there is a solution if one checks how internal scripts of package generation works. One just need somehow to remove the colon added for each of the entries in the package parameter list. Here is a possibility, how one can escape the colon for one of the entries:

So, what I did is to add a new empty entry first. Then for the "Name" part we add
'`and for the "Value" part we put:
'' `' really long description
This will enclose the colon added automaticaly by the package creation scripts into the accents signs hence escaping them.

The trick was tested in Netbeans 6.8 on an Ubuntu sid.

Have fun!

Art Tevs,    20. July 2010 12:01:29.
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