See: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617917#c15

Key descriptions are documentation, so they should be verbose - multiple sentences or sometimes multiple paragraphs. We want to be able to write:

  <description>
    This is a long description. With multiple sentences that
    are too long to fit into 80 columns. And would give standard
    editing tools fits if not line-wrapped.

    And a second paragraph
  </description>

And not have that be displayed to the user as, say:

---

    This is a long description. With multiple sentences 
that
    are too long to fit into 80 columns. And would give 
standard
    editing tools fits if not line-wrapped.

    And a second paragraph
---


The alternative of:

   <description>This is a long description <....> line-wrapped.
And a second paragraph.</description>

is really hard to edit in emacs or vi, doesn't work well with 'diff', etc.

Now we could just say that this all is a question to be settle between the tool and the people writing the schemas but I think that's suboptimal. Should be specified in the GSettings documentation.

Approaches:

 * Preserving whitespace as written: Not easy to work with when treating the schema file as text.

 *  XML whitespace normalization. (Consecutive sequences of whitespace turned into a single ' '.) Main problem is that there is no obvious way to represent a line break; to have multiple paragraphs. Metacity actually takes this approach, and while schemas are occasionally written with multiple paragraphs they get collapsed in gconf-editor.

 * Markup for paragraph breaks. (Say, allow <br/>)

 * Non-standard whitespace normlization. Say:

    - Strip any whitespace up to and including the first \n and after and including the last \n
    - Strip any common indent off the remaining lines
    - Remove \n, except leave \n\n