Re: Bug#197907: ITP: quark -- an audio player, for geeks, by geeks.

[Emile van Bergen <emile-deb@evbergen.xs4all.nl>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 10:54:11AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 05:39:40PM +0200, Sam Hocevar wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 18, 2003, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> > > Ugh.  Since when does the developer's reference recommend this?  The
> > > article most definitely belongs...
> 
> >    It is in 6.2.2:
> > 
> >                            Since the synopsis is a clause, rather than a
> >      full sentence, we recommend that it neither start with a capital nor
> >      end with a full stop (period).  It should also not begin with an
> >      article, either definite ("the") or indefinite ("a" or "an").
> > 
> >      It might help to imagine that the synopsis is combined with the
> >      package name in the following way:
> 
> >           <package-name> is a <synopsis>.
> 
> Grammatically, the article is part of the clause.  This recommendation
> is inconsistent.

"Since the synopsis is part of a clause..." would probably be better,
sure.

Also, "<package name> contains <synopsis>" could be suggested as a
template, see descriptions such as "header files for package xyz" or
"ABC support files", "development files", "KDE core applications", etc.

But in any case, no article seems to be the norm:

$ grep '^Description:' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
   9025
$ grep '^Description: [Aa][n ]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
   1163

at least on woody, with just a few small extra repositories. The
lowercase recommendation seems much less followed:

$ grep '^Description: [A-Z]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
   7661
$ grep '^Description: [a-z]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
   1262

Cheers,


Emile.

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