On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 13:45, Andreas Tille <andr...@an3as.eu> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:55:36PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote: >> If I remember correctly, DDTP got a short mention and the result was: >> "Wow, debian really has translations for package descriptions?!?" >> Other distributions seem to have only failed (=very outdated) tries if any. > > IMHO this does show two things: > 1. Debian is cool (people here know this). ;-) > 2. Debian fails to communicate this coolness. :-(
Unfortunately yes, debtags got a similar reaction and screenshots wasn't the best known thing either, but what this really shows is that we all fail big-time in communication across distros as I for example personally didn't know a single bit about zypper and the underlying sat-solver or to be fair just a bit more than nothing about the rpm world in general. Debian has a relatively good communication with derivates (thanks front-desk) but between deb and rpm world¹ is a pretty big gulf and on each side we (re)invent the wheel as its hard enough to communicate about your cool new $something in your own world, the "aliens" are even harder to app-roach… ¹ don't even thing of 'world of gentoo' or arch or one of the others now… I am thinking of the AppStream project therefore as a big experiment to work together and I have the strong hope that we can find more places where we can work on together instead of against each other. >> AppStream focuses on translations of the name, keywords and (short) >> summary managed by upstream. We talked shortly about longer descriptions >> (possibly with markdown) but this would easily blow up the currently >> rather small app-data.xml similar to how the long descriptions are quiet >> a big part of our Packages files currently - beside the problem: Who will >> write these descriptions: Upstream is not necessarily the best author… > > The question is: What is a "short" summary. From my packaging Approximation: It is our first line of the long description - at least that is how it is called in rpm world as they have a difference between summary and (long) description. There are btw many ambitions resulting from the gulf as we developed different names for essential the same thing (sections, recommends)… > For the content itself: I agree that upstream is not necessarily the > best author but I assume that maintainers in other dists are doing it > quite similar to waht we do in Debian: Revise a text from upstream or > try to invent one. So the descriptions are there - we just need to > define what a "good" (short) description is (there are bad examples > as well[2]) Thats another usecase of package name matching: "look at how debian describes the 'same' package compared to fedora." Sharing is maybe difficult as some descriptions mention alternatives and/or comparisons to other packages in the archive which is at least inconvenient if the mentioned program isn't packaged for $your-distro. Another thing is the rationality for suggesting an other package. E.g.: To play this foo game on lan with your friends you need to install the foo-lanserver on debian while mandriva ships both bundled… Best regards David Kalnischkies P.S.: A LOT of mails regarding descriptions were send only to the distributi...@l.fd.o list, so we might proceed in talking there. (beware: not subscribers are moderated which is kind of awkward, but heh, I don't make the rules…) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/AANLkTi=tnLi7W2m4J7KMPJ5yGPmkhqZ8c2m6Cz2B=l...@mail.gmail.com
