random bag of fixes

This is a collection of random fixes that I've done over the past month or so while working on TtT. They are not really related to each other, so I thought it'd be easier to review them all at once rather than one-per-MR. The details are in the commit messages.

The only controversial one might be stripping newlines from name/title and summary/short_description. I think it makes sense there because those are defined as one line entries. Since description/full_description is defined as a text block, I think the bytes should be passed through unchanged, in case someone wants to do some layout tricks with newlines.