On 2015-01-09 21:56:56 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote: > Hi Vincent, > > what is "too long"? For what?
For "dpkg -s" output, and any other method that also provides the description. These blank lines waste space, requiring more scrolling. Moreover, with "dpkg -s", as the description comes at the end, this long description "hides" the other information from "dpkg -s", unless a pager is used, but I assume that the end user doesn't expect so much output. > > The texlive-latex-extra package description has too many blank lines, > > making it too long: > > That is on purpose to help the translators. > Translation units are paragraphs, thus to make work for translators > easy we followed the suggestion of the translators in this way. The package description is for the end user, not for the translators. If there is a technical problem for the translators, then it should be solved without annoying the end user. > > It may also be better to just give the CTAN package names, without > > their description, and even that may be too much: using the Debian > > package description may not be the best way to search for a CTAN > > package anyway. > > Why, what is the problem you are having with the long descriptions? See above. > I *myself* use apt-cache search quite often to find a CTAN package > or a feature in this way. IMHO, a better tool should be provided; "apt-cache search" does not output the CTAN packages with their descriptions matching the request. And if the user just wants the Debian package corresponding to some CTAN package, there's apt-file for that. Similarly, packages usually don't include the list of binaries they provide (or without the description, like what coreutils does). I expect the same thing concerning CTAN packages, unless the list is short. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
