On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 08:43:02AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >>"Colin" == Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:
> Colin> Hi, this is not a major problem, but I'd like to see a bit more
> Colin> consistency among the package descriptions. The attached patch should
> Colin> be self-explanatory. A quick analysis of the Packages file suggests
> Colin> there is already a rough consensus in agreement.
> I formally object to this.
Yay. Woo.
> Why should the short description
> not be a full sentence?
Because making it just a phrase is briefer and conveys the same
information. There's a lot of stuff to read through when looking through
dselect, and the more we can minimise that the better.
> Why are we adding useless bloat to policy?
> This does not seem appropriate for policy anyway (there is no
> technical reason for not including a period, nor has there been any
> justification for doing it this way). Even if it were justified (I
> fail to see how), policy is not a best practices document.
Says who? Section 5.7.1 seems pretty much `best practices for writing
descriptions', eg.
IMO, what policy is is a means of recording the current consensus on
packaging issues amongst developers. It's necessary to have that written
down somewhere rather than in everyone's heads, since there's so much
of it and it's too easy to forget.
> Policy is also not a stick to shake at developers after they
> close bugs that you reported on the issue.
No, it's a tool to resolve confusion amongst developers: "Descriptions
should be short and not include useless words" or "Descriptions should
make grammatically correct sentences".
> It is equally likely that the better thing to do would be to
> require all short descriptions to have a ending period (indeed, this
> shall be my counter GR).
You want to inflate this to GR? Don't you have more useful things you
could be doing?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Debian: giving you the power to shoot yourself in each
toe individually.'' -- with kudos to Greg Lehey
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