RFC: Description text in packages

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 14:58 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le mardi 16 décembre 2008 à 15:16 -0500, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
> >> I fail to see how using the neutral quote character ", a perfectly
> >> valid
> >> standard unicode character, is the road to incompatible software and
> >> piles of quirks.
> > 
> > And I didn't object to «"», I object to using accents instead of quote
> > characters.
> 
> And I didn't see anyone disagree. You do, however, seem to be advocating 
> "fancy" quotes over ", which still sees far more usage (and which 
> everyone knows how to type).

 The problem is that PK currently alters the description text (I think
mainly to work around a bug/feature¹) substituting "fancy quotes" for
"normal" quotes (which I think is why this thread started, to try and
fix that in the packages!).
 Nicolas thinks tools altering the data in this way is bad, and I tend
to agree, with descriptions being what they are now it's not possible to
know that the alteration is always good.
 He also seems to haave a secondary argument that for lists, using o is
bad but ∘ is good. I'm not sure I agree there, but I see his point.

 Personally I think the use of '"', ., *, •, o or ∘ ... are fine, just
as long as all the tools are displaying the same non-invisible bytes².


¹ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459155

² Changing whitespace is different, I think, so the tools can do
readable wrapping ... but I'm prepared to be shown we shouldn't do that
in yum/whatever either (what we have now is certainly somewhat magic).

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora