[arch-general] Upstream urls and package descriptions

Alexander Rødseth rodseth at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 18:28:17 EDT 2013


Hi,


2013/8/1 Karol Blazewicz <karol.blazewicz at gmail.com>:
> Package descriptions:
> There was an attempt at improving the descriptions last year, but it
> didn't go so well
> https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/bitcoin&id=bd4647fb433c517c03fb08f869944dc987372a69

In my opinion, the changes themselves were successful, but the changes
were not well received. For me, it was instructive in learning about
which processes should be used in the future.


Just to single out the change you linked to, I think:

pkgdesc='Peer-to-peer network based digital currency - QT'

is a clear improvement over:

pkgdesc="Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency - QT"


After the changes were reverted, nothing more happened with this. As
far as I can remember, Angel wished to see the script, I gave him a
copy and he had an idea for a way forward.


I guess one possibility is to write a patch for namcap, makepkg or
pacman, or possibly write a general utility for formatting PKGBUILDs
(like "go fmt" does for Go source code).

The opportunities for PKGBUILD formatting are endless. Since it's
really just bash scripting, I doubt a tool for formatting PKGBUILD
files will be able to be *exact* and *precise* until a declarative
package format appears in the far future, if that should happen (and
if that should turn out to be a better way).

In any case, package maintainers can look at the svn log if they wish
to pull in the reverted change to the pkgdesc.


-- 
Sincerely,
  Alexander Rødseth
  xyproto / TU


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