Ubuntu not showing long descriptions

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

I have a really stupid question, but I haven't been able to find the answer,
even after reading man pages and doing Google searches.  How do I get
Aptitude and apt-cache to show the full package descriptions in Ubuntu
14.04?  For some reason, it only gives me a single line package description
no matter what package I look at.  I manually looked at the package lists
and they only have a short description as well, so obviously the full
description isn't being downloaded.  How can I fix this?  Thanks for any
help.  It's driving me nuts because I can't figure out what a package does
until I install it.