Re: Request for review: xz-utils package description

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

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Package: liblzma0
> Description: XZ (and LZMA) format compression library
>  XZ is the successor to the Lempel-Ziv/Markov-chain Algorithm
>  compression format, which gives memory-hungry but powerful
>  compression (often better than bzip2) and fast, easy decompression.

My mental parser trips on that “… gives memory-hungry but powerful
compression …”, looking for the object (“gives compression to what?”). I
would suggest:

    … which implements memory-hungry but powerful compression …

>  .
>  The native format of liblzma is XZ; it also supports raw
>  (headerless) streams and the older LZMA format used by lzma, but
>  not 7-Zip’s related format (see the package p7zip).

That whole reference to “7-Zip's related format” should be
parenthetical:

    … used by lzma. (For 7-Zip's related format, instead use the ‘p7zip’
    package.)

>  For more information on the XZ format, see the xz-utils package.

Rather than referring to a *package* for information, either refer to
the *documentation* (somewhere), or preferably drop this altogether.

I think the synopses can be improved slightly. Since XZ is a
“compression format”, this could work:

    Package: liblzma0
    Description: XZ (and LZMA) compression format – runtime library

    Package: xz-utils
    Description: XZ (and LZMA) compression format – command-line utilities
    
    Package: liblzma-dev
    Description: XZ (and LZMA) compression format – development files
    
    Package: liblzma-doc
    Description: XZ (and LZMA) compression format – API documentation

-- 
 \        “Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so |
  `\     why should they care about it?” —Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG, 2006 |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney