RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Thu Nov 20 22:16:46 UTC 2008


On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:58:57 -0500 (EST), Michal Hlavinka wrote:

> yes, but... example: you need some email client, so...
> yum search mail
> and you get:
> evolution-email client
> kmail-client for email
> mutt-mail agent
> squirrelmail-mail client
> 
> these summaries will be really short but really useless. 

No, your example is useless. "yum search mail" is way too generic to
even return anything useful.

$ sudo yum search mail|wc -l
368

And  yum search "mail client"  is too specific and only finds 23 packages,
missing kmail and evolution. ;-p

The query answer you've posted is not matching reality. Some 
examples:

  compface.i386 : Utilities for handling X-Faces
  mutt.i386 : A text mode mail user agent
  squirrelmail.noarch : SquirrelMail webmail client
  sylpheed.i386 : GTK+ based, lightweight, and fast email client

> You can't choose any package just from summary but you
> need to go one by one with yum info package.

Aha, and just because Yum's searching capabilities are so basic, you
want to squeeze more stuff into the summaries? Mind you, Yum also
searches the package _descriptions_, so naturally it hits more packages
the more strings you search for.

> IMHO summary should be descriptive enough to tell you not only difference between mutt and nut.
>

How far can we go? What details do you want to squeeze into the
summary? Imagine that with end-user GUI tools, the description and
other package details are just a click away.
 
> So again, if PackageKit is broken fix PackageKit, not everything else.

That applies to the length of the lines, yes. Being able to display
at most 80 chars per line is not asked too much. If PackageKit thinks
it must truncate pkg summaries, then let it do that instead of trying
to impose more restrictions on the packages. That discussion is
independent from trying to improve our guidelines, IMO.

> Do you really want to fix all these because of... what exactly? because summary is "too" descriptive?
> 

No, but there are summaries which are less useful because they are
too descriptive. :)




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