i have intended to raise this general issue someday - this seems like a fine opportunity
On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 17:52:02 +0200 Denis wrote: > we could try to explain why > flashrom-stable is relevant ourselves in the pkgdesc. > > - pkgdesc="Flashrom is a utility which can be used to detect, read, > erase, or write BIOS chips (DIP, PLCC, SPI)." > + pkgdesc="Flashrom is a utility which can be used to detect, read, > erase, or write BIOS chips (DIP, PLCC, SPI). This > flashrom-stalbe version doesn't require rust, so it is easier to > build and it still builds fine on the same platforms supported by > flashrom v1.2" that extra information (how we build it, or why) is not relevant to users of the binary package - there should not be such detail in the pkgdesc - pkgdesc is intended to be very brief (one line in a shell) for `pacman -Ss` - wael added those rationales to the PKGBUILD already to be pedantic though, that proposed pkgdesc conflicts with the arch guidelines for two reasons: > This is recommended to be 80 characters or less > and should not include the package name in a self-referencing way in the past, parabola packagers have added or changed pkgdesc to include details of "why do we rebuild it?" like: ", without webengine" ", without Twitter support" ", without YouTube support", - pkgdesc is to describe what the program can do for you - it should not be relevant to mention what the program does _not_ do - for example, if the package can be built without webengine and still serves its primary purpose, then webengine is obviously not an important feature - so why bother mentioning its presence or absence? i have been deleting those when i come across them, if only for the sake of a cleaner diff - however, most pkgdesc in nonprism include the "what it does not do" details; and i have left those in tact - most packages in nonprism are duplicates (not replacements) of another package in the system which "_do_ do that" - for nonprism, it does make sense to distinguish them somehow; but i dont think those details are documented anywhere else as it stands, flashrom-stable will not be a duplicate though - we decided that flashrom-stable can replace flashrom instead - maybe that needs more discussion - there is an open redmine ticket for flashrom now, which is the blacklist reference; so we should move further discussion of flashrom to redmine if anyone is interested, those "how and why" details can be found in the blacklist and related bug reports - in the case of flashrom-stable, it is also in the PKGBUILD - in general, i would not modify pkgdesc unless its wording conflicts with the FSDG, eg: "A snake game for Linux", or if the parabola modification make the upstream description incorrect, like things in nonprism - eg: "a client for gnu-social and twitter" would obviously be incorrect if twitter support was removed; but if the upstream pkgdesc was simply "a client for social websites", i would not see any reason to change it to: "a client for social websites, except for twitter", which has been the convention - thats "TMI" (too much information) _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
