Re: Package descriptions and making them better

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 10:03:21AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:

> Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> > an example I'd give for non-informative descriptions are the 3dwm's:
> >
> 
> IIRC I filed a bug on that a few weeks ago. 
> 
> Complete agreement with the parent rant BTW, and debian-proofreading
> sounds like a good idea *if* the descriptions are sent there
> automatically.

Spell-checking the whole lot of them would be a good start as well.  See

http://bugs.debian.org/111929

for one approach.  There would be some work involved to create a
dictionary of technical terms and acronyms to use as an auxiliary
database.  Lintian warnings might be a good outlet for such a check.

I did a brief initial check by stripping out only the descriptions from
a Packages file, creating a dictionary containing all package names, and
running it through aspell.  I only processed a small percentage of the
list (by hand).  Here were some examples of what I found:

specfic
seperated
splitted
controling
paricular
equiped
calander
caliberation
simultated
Thie
envtually
modluar
equilvalent
colorfull
enviroment
developmenti
primarly
visualation
mathimatical

This doesn't even begin to address grammatical errors, of which there
are plenty.

-- 
 - mdz