On 04 Dec 2002 12:55:50 -0500 Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> wrote: > http://people.debian.org/~walters/descriptions.html I do have some differences of opinion, though. It's sad, but there are a getting to be a fairly large number of DDs who are "attention grabbers". Just a few days ago, I saw a package description that said something along the lines of "this is the best package for this purpose" ... and it certainly wasn't. Even if it was, I think everybody would agree that that kind of language doesn't belong in a Debian package description. So, the opening section that talks about advertising and whatnot will probably give these sorts of people the wrong idea; I'd ammend it to: Debian package descriptions are the first avenue for you to give your audience relevant, useful information about your package. When you attempt to give somebody new knowledge, the key idea is to <em>know your audience</em>. Also, I'm not sure I agree with the third paragraph; everything in it is factual and well-said, but it'd be nice if somebody who *didn't* know what GTK+ and RAD are could know conclusively, "this is not what I want". When you're looking for something specific, but don't know the exact package name, the process of elimination is the best start. I know I, *personally*, have installed packages which I couldn't immediately rule out from the package description because I didn't *quite* understand the jargon. glade is a bad example for my point, though, because it has a great description :) In paragraph five ("So how can we better target these users?"), I'd s/minimum/appropriate amount/. I've seen bloody jihads in very well-known projects to give only the "minimum of technical jargon", and people invariably take it to far. Had they just stressed appropriateness of the text to the audience, things would have been much more reasonable. In paragraph six, ("So far we've mainly discussed the synopsis line"), I'd s/competition/alternatives/; s/advertisement/good documentation/. (BTW, if you totally disagree with me about this "advertisement" stuff, do replace all references to "advertisements" with "good advertisements" and whatnot :) Also, in the description template, two spaces are used after a period - is that standard nowadays? (My understanding was that they were primarily used for variable-width fonts, where a single space would take up very little page space. Since the descriptions should be presented in a fixed-width font (for many reasons, this also includes GUI package browsers), they're a bit redundant.) Thanks again :)
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