Modification of Summary: lines

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 17:54:23 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> what is the rationale behind the modifiation of the Summary: lines? E.g.
> 
> | Summary:	A small libc implementation
> 
> was changed to
> 
> | Summary:	Small libc implementation
> 
> 
> Is it really a better english to omit the 'A'?

Depends.

First of all, it's overly pedantic to apply such changes in every package.
I'm a bit afraid of the ping-pong effect, when package owners disagree
with such spec changes and revert them in future commits (also with regard
to tabs2spaces conversions, trailing spaces and dots and such).

I also think it's good taste to drop the trailing dot in the "Summary"
field and use it more like a descriptive title than a complete sentence.
But there are several packages at Red Hat, who seem to disagree.

For the name/title of documents/books/journals, the definite article is
usually dropped and maximal capitalisation is applied (i.e. upper-case
first character on every word but articles and prepositions). E.g. you
would call a book or documentation package "Introduction to Python
Programming" instead of "An introduction to Python programming". However,
there are exceptions, such as "The Standard C++ Library" instead of just
"C++ standard library", or "The GNU C/C++ Compiler" instead of just "GNU
C/C++ compiler".