Re: Package descriptions and making them better
On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 12:14:54AM +0200, Michael Bramer <grisu@debian.org> was heard to say:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 12:34:44PM -0400, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > Other people have already answered this..basically, there are a
> > couple things:
>
> don't you all understand my mails?
I composed most of this before reading all of your emails. Sorry
about that.
> > Firstly, while poor English skills are part of the problem, they are not
> > the whole problem. We also need to address the fact that people write
> > descriptions which are just not useful. In fact, this might almost be
> > more problematic than bad English -- in all but the most extreme cases,
> > a native speaker unfamiliar with the package can easily submit a bug
> > against it with grammatical and stylistic corrections; if the
> > description does not provide enough information to work out what the
> > package is/does, this can be very difficult.
>
> Because of this, the reviewer can request a special source package and
> he will get all descriptions of this package.
I don't understand this. Could you elaborate?
> > Secondly, these fixes should go into the main project files. The
> > ddts provides an auxillary location for translated descriptions, which
> > is a useful service given that dpkg and apt don't support translated
> > descriptions; however, the English-language descriptions are the only
> > description guaranteed to exist, they go into the packages themselves,
> > and they are shipped on CDs. They should be as correct as possible.
>
> ack.
>
> because of this, the server will _not_ make english Packages files
> etc. The server will not send notification mails to the maintainer.
> The server only store the newer descriptions and send this fixed
> description to the BTS.
>
> The server only coordinate the work of all the reviewer. We have >
> 6000 Descriptions (with > 2.7 MBytes) and this must be coordinated.
This might be somewhat useful, but I also think there are benefits to
a mailing list, where people can discuss changes and improvements.
(this would be primarily for descriptions of new packages, as doing all
the old packages would be way too much work)
> The server can send all reviewed description to a debian-* mailing
> list on a daily base (like the french list in the ddtp)
That sounds like it could be useful.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
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