Bug#280675: ITP: l2tpns
Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li> schrieb:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 03:34:45PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li> schrieb:
>> > On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 12:17:20PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>> >> To my taste, this description contains too many abbreviations, and is
>> >> only understandable for someone who already knows what they mean. Please
>> >> follow the general guidelines for descriptions,
>> > "The package description should be written for the average likely user"
>> >
>> > The average likely user should know what L2TP is and understand the
>> > LNSes role in this.
>> No, I don't think so. I think that "the average likely user" is meant
>> to be an average user of Debian, not the user of the package. This is
>> logical, because the purpose of the description is to allow a user to
>> decide whether he *is* the target user of the package.
>
> If the user doesn't understand the package description, is it not
> reasonable to assume they'll work out it's probably not for them?
No, it is not reasonable. There *are* lots of crappy^Wbad descriptions
around, and for a user it is, unfortunately, very reasonable to assume
that the solution to her/his problem lies in a package whose
descriptions she doesn't understand at all. Your package would add one
more that she'd have to check.
> If I
> went searching for something and found a handful of packages, some of
> which had many terms I didn't understand while the others did, I'd
> assume that some of the packages weren't appropriate to what I wanted.
Or that they had simply bad descriptions.
> Must we dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator rather
> than assuming our users have some level of intellegence?
This is not a question of intelligence. If you don't know anything about
chemistry, but you want to buy a chemistry experimentation kit for your
14 year old son or daughter (who is fond of chemistry and has yet read
lots of books), shouldn't the box of the kit tell _you_ whether it makes
sense to buy this one, or whether it will be much too easy or dangerous
for him/her? If you don't understand it - do you have a problem with
your intelligence? No.
Don't take this as an analogy for your package description - there might
be packages an admin installs on user request without knowing them, but
yours is not one of these. But take it as a hint that it is not about
intelligence.
> Would you be satisfied with "This package is not intended for users who
> want to setup a local dialup or similar connection; you probably want
> the ppp package instead." as the first paragraph of the description? Or
> perhaps "This package is aimed at those who need to terminate a large
> number of L2TP sessions; if you're a home user you probably want the ppp
> package".
Yes, that would be appropriate. Andreas suggestion sounds even better to
me, because it is not longer, but has the additional information what
L2TPNS is.
> I'm sorry, I disagree. PPP and ISP are commonly used terms and L2TP/LNS
> should be familiar to the users of the package.
Yes, PPP and ISP are common (although ISP is much less common for
non-english speaking users). But if, by the will of the gods of regexp
matching, a package shows up in a totally different context, the
abbreviations might have a totally different meaning in that context.
If an abbreviation can be avoided, it should be.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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