RFC: Description text in packages

[Christopher Stone]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 9:42 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 08:34:33AM -0800, Christopher Stone wrote:
>> Putting feature lists in descriptions is stupid.  Obviously, you would
>> have to update the description after each release which is stupid.  It
>> is most likely that feature lists in descriptions are simply cut &
>> paste jobs from an upstream web site which is stupid.
>
> I happen to think that it's reasonable to do this in some
> circumstances -- where the upstream website author has written a good,
> concise description of the package, and is clearly more familiar with
> the package than the Fedora maintainer.  And in any case, what is
> wrong with feature lists (even if they need to be updated)?  If
> someone has gone to the effort of doing 'yum info package' then it's
> quite likely they're interested in the features of that package.
>
> Rich.

So, why not just go to the upstream website?  Spec file descriptions
are not the place to look for feature lists...

I am certain that in 100% of all cases where feature lists are in spec
files, these lists are out of date, inaccurate, and not updated with
new features.  I also maintain that in 100% of all cases like this,
the package maintainer is just being lazy and simply cut&pasted the
feature list from the upstream web site, and has no intention
whatsoever of actually keeping the list up to date and accurate.