Re: Best pratices for short descriptions [was: Bug#220780: ITP: zope-zms -- Content management for science, technology and medicine]
Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 12:03, Florent Rougon wrote:
>> 1. You are making the assumption that the first word of a short
>> description can be safely capitalized (but not decapitalized, go
>> figure why), which is clearly wrong in general.
>
> If descriptions are formatted as I've been describing, capitalisation
> rules laid out by Branden and myself are not "clearly wrong in general."
You are not replying to what I wrote. I will suppose you need an
example. Here is one: a lot of software has a canonical name that starts
lowercase. ucLinux is one of them. You wrote in
<[🔎] 1069425165.13969.44.camel@pisces.woot.net> that the first character of
short descriptions cannot be safely lowercased by giving the XFree86
example, and falsely concluded that short descriptions should start
lowercase except in those special cases like XFree86, hoping that short
descriptions following your rules would make the following assertions
true:
- If the short description has to appear in the middle of a sentence,
then don't touch it.
- If the short description has to start with a capital letter, then
just upcase() the first letter.
Which is wrong in general. For example, a short description starting
with a noun such as ucLinux would break the second rule (and don't tell
me this is an acceptable exception: it is exactly equivalent to the
XFree86 case *you* cited in <[🔎] 1069425165.13969.44.camel@pisces.woot.net>
to legitimate your rule).
> I'm not sure where the problem lies here. The point is to write
> descriptions such that this _is_ possible.
Then, your statements are inconsistent. You cannot:
1. Tell people to write short descriptions such as:
Description: XFree86 client libraries
2. so that they can be automatically be incorporated in sentences such
as:
"The package xlibs-client provides XFree86 client libraries"
3. while telling people to change their:
Description: [aA] program that...
to:
Description: program that...
4. and at the same time pretend that you are trying to have
descriptions written so that the sentence in 2 is possible.
(5. and be consistent, because you could do 1, 2, 3 and 4, actually ;-)
If you wonder, 1 and 2 are taken from
<[🔎] 1069425165.13969.44.camel@pisces.woot.net>, 3 from a fair percentage of
your replies to recent ITPs and 4 from the message I am responding to.
Friendly,
--
Florent
Reply to: