Package: clog
Version: 1.1.0-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
The package description for clog is ungrammatical enough to be rather
hard to understand.
> Description: highlight (or hide) important information
This has two major problems:
* lack of context. What sort of "information" is it filtering?
Emails? YouTube videos? Debian package descriptions?
* bad elision. You don't mean "highlight important information or
hide important information"; nobody wants to hide that! You
mean something like "highlight important information or hide
trivial information".
It also has one minor problem: it doesn't match the DevRef
recommendation that the synopsis should be a noun phrase fitting the
template "this package provides a..."
> clog is useful for watching log files. It can highlight important
> information or hide it. It let colorize patterns in the input and
^^ ^^^
First a variant of the same failure of elision, then a more
significant grammatical problem: you seem to be using "let" to mean
"allows you to". But that's still not quite right, since it isn't the
input that's colorized, it's the output, and the patterns it's being
compared to aren't in either - they're in your clogrc.
> lines in the input, suppress lines matching a pattern in the input,
Until I read the man page I was genuinely uncertain what "and lines in
the input" was trying to say there. The next clause is much clearer.
> add timestamps to all lines and add datestamps to all lines.
This is fair enough; it's repetitive, but that's better than having
the repetitions elided wrongly.
The description needs a thorough rewrite. Even just reverting to the
version on the upstream website would be a slight improvement:
| Clog is useful for watching log files. It can highlight important
| information or hide it.
| * Colorize patterns in the input
| * Colorize lines in the input
| * Suppress lines matching a pattern in the input
| * Add timestamps to all lines
| * Add datestamps to all lines
But once I'm looking at http://tasktools.org/projects/clog/ the
question becomes: why not just use the other description given there?
| Clog is a colorized log tail utility. It can spot patterns in an
| input stream and colorize or suppress the lines. It can also decorate
| the lines with time- or date-stamps.
This sounds as if it was written by a native speaker, and contains
very nearly as much information as the longwinded bulleted-list
version. It just needs to be split into a synopsis and long
description - something like this:
# Description: colorizing log tail utility
# Clog is useful for watching log files. It can spot patterns in an input
# stream and colorize or suppress the lines. It can also decorate the lines
# with time- or datestamps.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 3.11-trunk-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages clog depends on:
ii libc6 2.17-92+b1
ii libgcc1 1:4.8.1-10
ii libstdc++6 4.8.1-10
clog recommends no packages.
clog suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
diff -ru clog-1.1.0.pristine/debian/control clog-1.1.0/debian/control
--- clog-1.1.0.pristine/debian/control 2013-09-20 15:38:50.000000000 +0100
+++ clog-1.1.0/debian/control 2013-09-28 17:55:02.152452619 +0100
@@ -13,8 +13,7 @@
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends},
${misc:Depends}
-Description: highlight (or hide) important information
- clog is useful for watching log files. It can highlight important
- information or hide it. It let colorize patterns in the input and
- lines in the input, suppress lines matching a pattern in the input,
- add timestamps to all lines and add datestamps to all lines.
+Description: colorizing log tail utility
+ Clog is useful for watching log files. It can spot patterns in an input
+ stream and colorize or suppress the lines. It can also decorate the lines
+ with time- or datestamps.
