[arch-dev-public] Unannounced mass edit of community PKGBUILDs

[Thorsten Töpper]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:07:09 +0300
Evangelos Foutras <evangelos at foutrelis.com> wrote:

> I noticed that all of my community packages were modified by r78782
> [1] (Full pkgdesc cleanup for 2339 packages).
> 
> This was not discussed beforehand as it should. I would have been
> against it and we probably would have saved ourselves lots of unneeded
> noise in the repository.
> 
> Besides the obtrusiveness of this commit, there were a couple more
> issues:
> 
> - Indentation of pkgdesc inside package_*() functions was lost
> - Double quotes were changed to single quotes even though
> /usr/share/pacman/PKGBUILD.proto uses single quotes
> 
> Whether or not it is a good idea to automatically try and correct
> slightly wrong package descriptions (in my opinion it's not worth it),
> the lack of communication is unacceptable.
> 
> I went ahead and reversed the changes moments ago so the whole thing
> is now a noop.
> 
> Please let's not do this again. :)
> 
> [1]
> https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/?id=9f040fd30a39c05d750d670ca40fc80f6c648b71

As all of my packages were also part of this commit, it'd really be nice
to be told about the reason for this. Because it were not just the pure
quotes but also the content of the description.

https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/diff/john/trunk/PKGBUILD?id=9f040fd30a39c05d750d670ca40fc80f6c648b71

It is not wanted for packages to contain the package name in the
description and this is right for almost every package, yet in my
opinion the package john is one of the few exceptions. The program
sources and binaries are a plain "john", yet the project itself is best
known as "John The Ripper". So most people will probably search for
this and not just "john" when they need this tool. If this shall not be
the case I don't have a problem with removing the project name from the
description but stripping the name with a small script is not right.

Evangelos, thank you for reversing this commit and bring attention to
it.

-- 
Jabber: atsutane at freethoughts.de Blog: http://atsutane.freethoughts.de/
Key: 295AFBF4     FP: 39F8 80E5 0E49 A4D1 1341 E8F9 39E4 F17F 295A FBF4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 222 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20121025/04344f58/attachment.asc>