Re: length of a package extended description
On 2015-01-09 14:56:14 -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Jan 2015, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > The blank lines are not the only problem. Removing them would be a big
> > step forward, but the description would actually still be much too
> > long (more than 900 lines).
>
> Lines aren't really the issue here; the primary one is space in the
> Packages file[1], and the secondary one is utility for users.
It was important for me.
> Every extra line is only an extra byte, after all.
But it is an extra line on the terminal, thus twice more scrolling,
and more chances to get "important" lines lost (the xterm buffer is
in term of lines, not bytes).
Note that the long list has a drawback even for "apt-cache search":
texlive-latex-extra matches on "apt-cache search svg pdf conver" only
because of the long list of unrelated things, not because the package
provides something related to conversion between SVG and PDF. If all
packages also provided extensive descriptions, there would be much
more uninteresting matches.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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