Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Description: Standard Widget Toolkit for GTK+ Java library
>
> Having a look at the short description itself one could misunderstand it as
> too much capitalisation. Actually it does not obey the Developer's Reference
> recommendations (2): It repeats the package name.
No it doesn't - the package name is "libswt-gtk-3-java". This is the
*expansion* of that name, which handily also serves as an adequate
short description, and which is entitled to capitalise "Standard
Widget Toolkit" here just as much as it is in the first line of the
long description.
> And though its upstream's
> fault (3) the package name itself is too generic. It makes sense to translate
> it.
I don't see how your proposal makes it less generic by dropping the
uniquely identifying feature that it is (or claims to be) the
*standard* toolkit.
Now, I can see how a synopsis that does double duty as a description
of the software and an explanation of its abbreviated name is going to
make life difficult for translators, but that's not enough of a reason
to prohibit it in the original English. Just translate it as a pure
explanation, without any extra uppercase, and demote the why-the-name
hint into the long description. libswt-gtk-3-java makes this easy by
putting a more explicit expansion of SWT right where you want one!
> The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a fast and rich GUI toolkit for the
> Java programming language. SWT provides efficient, portable and fast
> access to native controls and user interface facilities on the platforms
> where it has been implemented.
>
> It's very much appreciated that you did *not* copy the upstream description
> verbatim. "For" sounds like geek speech to me. Perhaps I have a German point
> of view at the description.
I'm afraid so; to me a "toolkit for Java" seems unremarkable.
Notice that "GUI toolkit" is *not* capitalised as "GUI ToolKit", which
signals to anglophone readers that it *isn't* serving as an expansion
of the TLA "GTK" (which is really the "GIMP ToolKit"). If we imposed
a rule forbidding the "inline expansion" style demonstrated in the
synopsis, we'd be making it impossible to draw this sort of useful
distinction.
> This package includes the SWT JAR libraries.
>
> Are you sure that Jon Doe knows what a JAR (4) is? (Sorry for citing a German
> source.)
Well, this is a runtime library package; if John Doe sees it in the
package repositories and doesn't understand what it's for, he can
assume he doesn't need to know - on Debian, it'll be pulled in
automatically if his system needs it for anything. Of course, to look
at it the other way, anybody who can make any real use of this
information probably doesn't need to be told that runtime libraries
for Java are distributed as zipfiles with a .jar extension, so there's
no real need to put that information in every package description any
more than we mention .so files for all the C libraries.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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