identical extended descriptions
Ok, I'm increasingly annoyed at large sets of packages that differ in small
ways and share identical extended descriptions, with only a cursory
indication of the difference given in the short description. I know there
are more, but this is the set I stumbed upon tonight:
Description: Netscape Navigator 4.72 (static Motif)
Netscape (pronounced "Mozilla") is a graphical World-Wide-Web browser
with many features. It supports advanced features of HTML and new
technologies such as "Java" from Sun Microsystems.
.
If you do not have Motif(a commercial product) installed, then this
is the version you need.
Description: Netscape Navigator 4.72 (static Motif) (libc5 version)
Netscape (pronounced "Mozilla") is a graphical World-Wide-Web browser
with many features. It supports advanced features of HTML and new
technologies such as "Java" from Sun Microsystems.
.
If you do not have Motif(a commercial product) installed, then this
is the version you need.
And
Description: This installs a standard set of netscape programs
This will install the static motif version of communicator(which
includes the web browser, email, and news clients), java support,
spell checking support(used in the email client), and online
help.
.
This package has NO files. It only depends on other packages.
Once you install this, and all the packages it depends on, you can
remove it, without loosing any functionality.
.
If you do not have Motif(A commercial library), then you want
to install this version.
Description: This installs a standard set of netscape programs (libc5 version)
This will install the static motif version of communicator(which
includes the web browser, email, and news clients), java support,
spell checking support(used in the email client), and online
help.
.
This package has NO files. It only depends on other packages.
Once you install this, and all the packages it depends on, you can
remove it, without loosing any functionality.
.
If you do not have Motif(A commercial library), then you want
to install this version.
Note that the netscape-smotif-461* set of packages also have identical
extended descriptions to those above.
If you blink, (or, for the second set, if you have a terminal with lines under
78 columns and use dselect), you will miss the tiny differences in the short
description.
The long description is there for a reason, and I feel these packages are
ignoring it it. The libc5 versions should explain, in detail, why you
might want to install those packages over the non-libc5 versions. An extended
description should be a hand-crafted description of a package, not some
boilerplate you've used for 4 different packages.
If other people agree with me, I'll work up a suitable proposal.
--
see shy joa
Reply to: