Re: Usability: Technical details in package descriptions?
ke, 2005-07-20 kello 14:47 -0500, Steve Greenland kirjoitti:
> While mostly agreeing with the other comments ("libbar is a C library"
> is useful/appropriate; "foo is a perl program" is not.), I'd guess
> this is a symptom of a more general problem: far too many package
> descriptions are taken verbatim from the upstream website/whatever.
> This leads to the irrelevant technical details you noted, as well
> as unfounded hyperbola ("Foo is the world's best baz mangler") and
> generally bad writing.
It seems to me that many package descriptions could be improved:
misspellings, bad grammar, unclarity, hyperbole or advertising,
irrelevant things, missing things, etc. Maybe it would be worthwhile to
have a weekend, similar to a bug squashing party, where all descriptions
are proofread and for those that need it, a proposed new description
filed as a wishlist bug?
Given 15000 packages, and 20 volunteers, and on average two minutes per
description (given that most descriptions probably only need little or
no tweaking), this would take only about 24 hours.
This would require people who can proof-read and fix English text pretty
well, however. A checklist of things to watch out for would help, but
isn't enough.
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