RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

Richard Hughes hughsient at gmail.com
Thu Nov 20 14:33:27 UTC 2008


The packaging guidelines have a single sentence on package summaries:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Summary_and_description

"The summary should be a short and concise description of the package"

Broken packages are a problem as PackageKit shows the summary first (in
bold) in preference to the package name. This is by design.

Quite a lot of packages have summary text that is overly verbose, and
this makes the GUI and output from pkcon look rubbish.

For instance, I've filed
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472365 where the oggconvert
package has a summary of:

"A simple GNOME application that converts media files to Free formats"

First, we don't need to say it's an application, not that it's GNOME
specific. Surely something like this would be better:

"Simple media converter"
or
"Simple conversion to free media formats"
or
"Simple media converter using free formats"

The guidelines also don't say if it should be Title Case or if the
summary should include the application name. If we come to some
guidelines (or working practices) on this email thread, I'll update the
wiki page with more details.

It would also be a good idea to have a few "shining examples" for people
to copy when creating new packages. When we've done that, I'll start
filing bugs.

Thanks,

Richard.





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