RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

[James Antill]

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"
> 
> Broken packages are a problem as PackageKit shows the summary first (in
> bold) in preference to the package name. This is by design.

 What is the rationale for this design? Just a guess that it's better?

> Quite a lot of packages have summary text that is overly verbose, and
> this makes the GUI and output from pkcon look rubbish.
> 
> For instance, I've filed
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472365 where the oggconvert
> package has a summary of:
> 
> "A simple GNOME application that converts media files to Free formats"
> 
> First, we don't need to say it's an application, not that it's GNOME
> specific. Surely something like this would be better:
> 
> "Simple media converter"
> or
> "Simple conversion to free media formats"
> or
> "Simple media converter using free formats"

 Why is "simple" a useful word, but GNOME isn't? For someone using a
GNOME desktop I could see the later being much more helpful.
 Also, as someone else mentioned:

PackageKit.x86_64 : System daemon that is a DBUS abstraction layer for package
                  : management

..."abstraction layer" seems more wordy than needed, also "system
daemon" seems redundant:

PackageKit.x86_64 : DBUS daemon for package management

...a list of stop words like that, might be useful ... or even better
someone should get a librarian involved in Fedora :)

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora