On Wed, 2002-12-04 at 14:38, Joey Hess wrote: > Your emphasis on audiences is very good, but I am leery of the treatment > of package descriptions as advertisements. A package description that > reads like an in-your-face advertisement can suck at being a package > description. You're right in some ways about the correspondance, but I > think the thing you leave out is that these are "advertisements" that > are aimed at getting only the users who should install a package to > install it, not all users, and that if the "advertisement" gets accross > to someone that this is probably not the package they want, it is also > doing its job. Particularly if it helps them find the package they _do_ > want. These are not features of traditional commercial advertisements. > Insert some mumbling about zero-sum games here.
Ok, I changed the guide a bit more to emphasize a bit more that descriptions should also be useful. > The easiest problem to point to WRT description-as-advertisement is it > encourages the insertation of useless superlatives into the description, > as you do in the example template when you say "foo is a powerful..". Ok, people don't really like the "powerful" sample adjective, apparently :) I've dropped it. > Look at the uses of powerful in existing descriptions, for example, and > see how many you agree with: Yeah, I know. > I'd rather that our descriptions were more objective and weren't afraid > to say "hey, if you're looking for a really good <foo> and don't have > specialized needs x y and z, you probably want <bar> instead". Ok, I mentioned that in the guide too.
