Re: RFC: Better formatting for long descriptions

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 13:26:36 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Michael Banck wrote:
> > So it would be great if some numbers could be brought up first (maybe
> > Andreas has a rough overview now, because he looked at the different
> > kinds of itemizations).
>
> Well, I had not but you can get it somehow by
>
> for tag in "\*" "-" "+" "o" ; do
>     echo "Tag $tag was used `grep "^  $tag " /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l` times"
> done
>
> Tag \* was used 5647 times
> Tag - was used 2710 times
> Tag + was used 85 times
> Tag o was used 282 times
>
> which only counts those who have proper spacing - but for a rough estimation
> '*' wins definitely.

Even if we'd have to fix all the entries with wrong spacing anyway to
reach correctness, I was curious to see numbers for all spacing variants
for a wider representation of the characters used:


,-- count-bullet-chars.sh --
#!/bin/sh
lists=/var/lib/apt/lists/*_sid_main_*_Packages
total=`grep "^ *[-+\*o] " $lists | wc -l`
for tag in "\*" "-" "+" "o"; do
  items=`grep "^ *$tag " $lists | wc -l`
  percent=`echo "scale=4; $items / $total * 100" | bc`
  echo "Tag $tag was used $items times ($percent%)"
done
`--

Tag \* was used 9277 times (68.0900%)
Tag - was used 3837 times (28.1600%)
Tag + was used 120 times (.8800%)
Tag o was used 390 times (2.8600%)


Regardless of the numbers though (which have moved lately slightly in
favour of '-' due to the recommendations from the Smith reviewing
project), I've always found the asterisk the obvious character to use
for bulleted lists, as it's the one ressembling the most a bullet, and
it's the one we use in changelog entries and similar.

regards,
guillem