Re: length of a package extended description
On 2015-01-10 05:03:56 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> (I am not subscribed to Cc, due to obvious reasons, so please Cc
> me any further *relevant* remarks - I don't care for the rants)
>
> concerning Vincent's email: he mentioned that:
> > but the maintainer disagrees.
> but he did not mention that:
> * half of the package descriptions are empty lines, to make each
> contained CTAN package a single paragraph
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).
> * this change was made on request of the translators
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=493778
This bug report says: "too long package description". This is the
main problem.
The issue with the translations is just a consequence, but also
just because the translators don't use a properly designed tool.
The correct solution would be to fix the tool (e.g. to support
lists), not to introduce lots of blank lines useless for the end
user.
> It is an extremely useful feature to search for CTAN package names
> as well as keywords in the short description of CTAN packages.
Instead, some texlive package should provide a tool to search for
CTAN packages. Thus would be more useful: from some keywords, the
user would get the exact CTAN package name(s), instead of just
the Debian package "texlive-latex-extra", which doesn't give much
information. Moreover this would avoid false positives in one way
or the other: getting too many results is just bad as getting
nothing. A text file may be sufficient, since such a file is
searchable.
Similarly, for the same reason to be able to search via apt-cache,
the extended description of every Debian package could include each
executable they provide with an associated short description. But
this would be insane.
--
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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