Bug#536889: [developers-reference]: Please add an example for the short description starting with a verb
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:02:02PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> The next step is to get your comments together as something I can
> conveniently point at in a post to debian-l10n-english.
Oops, missed that you waited for my input.
> Criticisms:
> 1) basically, it's not clear that verb phrases are the main thing
> we're deprecating;
> 2) in particular, the "noun phrase/verb phrase" part can be read as
> an incidental description of the given example;
> 3) more examples (both "should" and "should not") would be good;
> 4) "a good heuristic" also makes it sound as if fitting the template
> is optional. (Yes, the underlying definition is a matter of
> syntax, but since developers don't usually think in terms of
> noun phrases or verb phrases, the "heuristic" is the only
> practical validation mechanism.)
Yep, this is a good summary.
> You also mention the issue of translations. I don't know if we'd
> want to even try to apply "the same rule" in languages that use
> suffixed articles, or no articles at all! And Verb-Subject-Object
> languages like Welsh would make things even trickier...
Right, forget about translations. Even in English one cannot construct a
sentence from the synopsis as the article (a, an, ...) has to be determined
manually ...
Jens
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