Re: Request for review: xz-utils package description

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Justin B Rye <jbr@edlug.org.uk> writes:

>     XZ is the successor to the Lempel-Ziv/Markov-chain Algorithm, which
>     gives memory-hungry but powerful compression (often better than bzip2)
>     and fast, easy decompression.
>
> Boilerplate can be a pain if it's yards of advertising fluff, but
> done well it can be handy - paragraph one, what this software
> suite's all about; paragraph two, why you'd install this particular
> element.
>
> (There's a counterargument that the payload should be in the first
> line, but I'd say that's why we have a short description too.)

Agreed with all of this, FWIW. A simple “about this software suite” as
the first paragraph helps understand any one of the packages in
isolation without needing to know ahead of time that it's a member of a
suite.

> If the bulleted list is worth having (either in this description or
> the -dev one) it sounds as if it would be along the lines of:
>  * support for format-specific metadata (file magic for .xz files);

Whoops, there's that conflation of concepts again.
Try: “… file magic for XZ files”.

>  * configurable memory usage (low settings still give good results);
>  * can make use of extra memory during compression or decompression;
> (I wish I could re-word that one as a noun phrase like the rest...)

  * opportunistic usage of extra memory during compress/decompress

>  * crc32 integrity checking;
>  * familiar zlib-like low-level operation;
> (if you can get away with spinning that as an advantage)
>  * support for variant compressor/decompressor implementations.

Let's see how that looks with the complete set of descriptions.

-- 
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Ben Finney