RFC: Description text in packages

[Richard Hughes]

It seems many packagers have committed new summary text for their
packages, and I thank you all for that.

Next on my list are insane descriptions. For instance, just take a look
at the description for enlightenment (many pages in length) and various
packages using ``quoting'' or ''quoting''. Many packages also try to do
a bullet list using '*' or '-', usually with a random amount of spacing.

Question 1: Should we use '', "", or the UTF-8 quote characters? If we
use LaTeX style ``double'' and `single' formatters then it's trivial for
the session programs to either use ˵˶ or «» depending on the locale.

Question 2: What's the maximum permitted length of a description? For
some stuff like enlightenment there's a short essay in the description.

Question 3: How should a description be bulletted? Using '*' or the
UTF-8 '•' marker?

One such example:

--------------------------------------------------------------
Mousepad is a text editor for Xfce based on Leafpad. The initial reason for
Mousepad was to provide printing support, which would have been difficult
for Leafpad for various reasons.

Although some features are under development, currently Mousepad has following
features:

    * Complete support for UTF-8 text
    * Cut/Copy/Paste and Select All text
    * Search and Replace
    * Font selecton
    * Word Wrap
    * Character coding selection
    * Auto character coding detection (UTF-8 and some codesets)
    * Manual codeset setting
    * Infinite Undo/Redo by word
    * Auto Indent
    * Multi-line Indent
    * Display line numbers
    * Drag and Drop
    * Printing
--------------------------------------------------------------

Now, this format makes it very difficult for PackageKit to display the
description test in a sane way. PackageKit already joins lines together
to fit properly on the word-wrapped length, but preserving paragraph
markers.

If the bullet format was:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Although some features are under development, currently Mousepad has following
features:

* Complete support for UTF-8 text
* Is has multiple features of note
 * Like this one
  * But this is not important
* And this one
--------------------------------------------------------------

The session tools could do multilevel indenting with the correct locale
UTF-8 character (•, ‣, etc).

Comments please.

Richard.