Re: Request for Review: APT manpages
Ben Finney wrote:
> David Kalnischkies writes:
>> Justin B Rye <jbr@edlug.org.uk> wrote:
>>> <refpurpose>Distribution definitions for APT</refpurpose>
On second thoughts this is rubbish.
>> Maybe
>> <refpurpose>List of sources to acquire package information from</refpurpose>
>> ?
>
> The established term for these is “repository”, I think.
I'm not convinced; do users really think of that term as covering
CD-sets or unstructured directories like file:/home/jbr/debs? If my
sources.list contains only an unstable "deb" line and a corresponding
"deb-src" line, how many repositories is that? Whatever the answer
is, I don't think it's obvious enough for the term to be helpful.
> <refpurpose>Definitions for package repositories</refpurpose>
>
> The common meaning of “repository” is understood well enough that
> “package repository” communicates the meaning correctly, I think.
As apropos output, this would imply that the file has entries that
define what squeeze-backports and debian-multimedia are. Readers
would probably expect that to mean that it documents which codename
maps to stable, and so on; they would also be likely to misinterpret
it as meaning that the man page itself contains these definitions.
Instead what sources.list contains is APT resource formulae. I think
David's right to abandon the search for a self-explanatory jargon term
and just spell it out; "List of sources to acquire package information
from" does a pretty good job of saying what's in it while also making
it sound reasonable that the file is called "sources.list"!
Just fiddling with it slightly, how about one of these:
<refpurpose>List of sources for package information</refpurpose>
<refpurpose>List of package information sources for APT</refpurpose>
<refpurpose>List of configured APT data sources</refpurpose>
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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