On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 14:33 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote: > The packaging guidelines have a single sentence on package summaries: > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Summary_and_description > > "The summary should be a short and concise description of the package" Sorry to keep going on about this, but this is the contents of the email I'm about to send to ~50 package maintainers. _______________________________________________________________ Hi! You've received this email because you're listed as a maintainer of one or more packages in Fedora with a "bad summary"[1]. We've been talking recently about perhaps adding clarification to the package guidelines, specifically about what a package summary should contain: Many GUI packaging tools make the summary more prominent than the package name. The summary is often a better description for the end user when making a decision about installing. To make the user's experience better here, we try to have short succinct summaries that don't repeat information in the name. The summary needs to show differentiators that help the user choose which package to take a look at in more detail. Depending on the type of package we're looking at some of these should have different information than others. Libraries should also make clear what programming language they're useful for in addition to their claim to fame. The summary should also be a verb phrase, for example "DVD and CD authoring software" rather than "Create video DVDs and CDs". For some packages it may be helpful to expand the package name that is an acronym, e.g. for the package "gimp", the summary could be "GNU Image Manipulation Program". Good summaries: * Package management framework * XQuery and XPath 2.0 library for Xerces-C * Simple video DVD and CD authoring software * Feature rich media player * Media Player from the Mozilla Foundation * Gstreamer based media player * Customizable media player Bad summaries: * System daemon that is a DBUS abstraction layer for package management (too verbose) * XQilla is an XQuery and XPath 2.0 library, built on top of Xerces-C (repeating the program name) * DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD) (to much detail) If you have any questions or just want me to commit a fix and leave you alone, please feel free to email me back. Thanks, Richard [1] where "bad" is defined by a simple tool written by me, and isn't a reflection on you as a maintainer. :-) _______________________________________________________________________ What do you think of that? Richard. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
