Re: [RFR] urlwatch
Franck Joncourt wrote:
> Description: email notifications of changes to URLs
That's a Noun Phrase minus article, which is good DevRef-compliant
syntax. Mind you, strictly speaking it's a description of what the
package generates, not a description of the package...
It took me a while to realise that urlwatch doesn't literally just
watch URLs for changes ("Oh, look, http://example.org/foo has become
https://foo.example.org";), it monitors websites for updates to their
(formatted) contents! So would it be okay to change the short
description to something like this:
Description: tool for monitoring webpages for updates
This deliberately uses slightly different words from the long
description to make searches easier. I've lost the headline mention
of mail notifications, but then again, urlwatch doesn't itself
invoke /bin/mail, does it? It just plugs into a user's crontab like
a sensible monitoring utility.
Also, you spelled e(-)mail in two different ways.
> This script is intended to help you watch URLs and get notified
> (via e-mail) of any changes. The change notification will include
> the URL that has changed and a unified diff of what has changed.
> The script supports stripping always-changing parts of a page
> through the use of a filter hook function.
>
> Any word/sentence you would like to change in order to improve this
> description?
The only part that feels at all odd in English-usage terms is the
term "always-changing", which doesn't feel right at all.
"Ever-changing" is slightly more idiomatic, but now it's got me
worrying about whether webpages change while nobody is looking.
Maybe it would be better to rephrase:
The script supports the use of a filtering hook function to strip
trivially-varying elements of a webpage.
--
JʙR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
Reply to: