On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 05:14:42PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 14:43:29 -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> said: > > > I think brevity can be a virtue. Maybe you don't, given how > > long-winded your report template managed to be, while saying so > > little. :-P > Brevity may well be the virtue of princes, but to tell a > novice use what a package does, whether they should consider > installing it on their machine, how it is different from the > competition (if any), and the advantages or disadvantages of the > package - all in under 80 characters -- well, that, for the majority > of one liner descriptions I see, smacks of a misfounded expectation > of genius. > I am not sure of the packages you refer to, but the odd dozen > or so I chased down, the one liner was indeed inadequate. > Why is there this desire for arcana, or a gauntlet of > learning curves to be thrown at users as a rite of passage before > they can use our packages? Because the packages in question *are* arcane, and should *not* be installed by novice users who don't already know what they are? IOW: for some package descriptions, being cryptic an inaccessible to users is a feature, not a bug. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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