Re: Review package description for liferea (Bug #745842)
David Smith wrote:
> Please review this updated package description for the package liferea.
You left out the synopsis line:
Description: feed aggregator for GNOME
This makes me wonder exactly how GNOME-specific it is, but otherwise
looks good.
> Liferea is a linux feed reader that brings together all of the content
> from your favorite news feeds into an interface that's easy to organize
> and browse.
>
> TinyTinyRSS and TheOldReader connections are supported so that you can
> synchronize your feeds and (un)read items across multiple devices.
>
> Supported news formats include Rich Site Summary (RSS), Atom
> Syndication (Atom), Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Channel
> Definition Format (CDF).
The original was somewhere low down on my list of packages to get
round to, but expanding the initialisms does nothing to fix the main
thing that was wrong with it. If I don't know what an RSS feed is,
learning that it stands for "Rich Site Summary" isn't going to help,
and expanding "Atom" to "Atom" is particularly futile.
My only comment that really rates as an English usage issue is
s/linux/Linux/, which had already been mentioned - you might even
capitalise it as "LInux FEed REAder" to make the why-the-name hint
clearer (see footnote).
The main problem that's left is that if (like me) you've never used a
feed reader, there's very little here to tell you what functionality
such an application offers. It's very clear about which particular
XML syndication formats it supports - but why should users care about
that question if the answer is "all the standard ones"? Or are there
important formats it _doesn't_ support?
Compare Wikipedia, which describes it as supporting "the major feed
formats including RSS/RDF and Atom", doesn't mention CDF, but later
mentions that it also supports OCS and OPML, whatever those are.
The mention of the interface is a definite improvement - at least now
I can be sure Liferea isn't a CLI tool like wget, or a daemon that
updates my bookmarks overnight, or some such. But it still doesn't
really convey the idea that Liferea has a GTKish interface modelled
after a threaded mail/newsclient with an embedded graphical browser;
and there's still no mention of what it is that it's aggregating
beyond the label "news", which is a poor description for most of the
stuff people use subscriptions for.
Looking at the upstream homepage I see that they list features like
* Read articles when offline
[...]
* Permanently save headlines in news bins
* Play Podcasts in Liferea
Aren't these worth mentioning? I mean, maybe they're routine features
of any Feed Reader, but now that the other Feed Readers aren't being
mentioned any more...
So I would suggest something roughly along the lines of:
Description: feed aggregator for GNOME
Liferea is a Linux feed reader that brings together all of the content
from your favorite web subscriptions into a GUI that's easy to organize
and browse. It supports:
.
* aggregating feeds in all the major syndication formats (including
RSS/RDF, Atom, CDF, and more);
* synchronizing feeds across devices, with TinyTinyRSS and
TheOldReader support;
* downloading articles to read while offline;
* permanently saving headlines in news bins;
* playing podcasts directly in Liferea's browser interface.
Obligatory WhyTheName footnote:
It's easy to guess that the person who coined the name was German;
LiFeRea is a style of abbreviation that seems vaguely unpopular with
native anglophones, though I don't know whether that's because it's
hard to guess how it should be pronounced or whether such coinages
just remind people too much of cases like "GeStaPo" and "KomSoMol".
Sticking "Linux" on the front wasn't a great choice anyway, given that
it apparently builds for kfreebsd-*.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
Reply to: