Package: tea
Version: 33.1.0-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
The package description for tea has a few typos and other language
errors.
> Package: tea
> Architecture: any
> Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, tea-data (= ${source:Version})
> Recommends: bzip2, antiword, aspell, hunspell
(Wait, why does it recommend aspell *and* hunspell? I suspect this
should be "aspell | hunspell", but I'll stick to just reviewing the
descriptions.)
> Description: text editor with syntax highlighting & UTF support
"UTF support" presumably means "UTF-8 support", but it has been
several releases since that was something you'd be entitled to count
as a bonus feature - these days failing to support Unicode would
warrant a fairly severe bug report. I would suggest that instead it
should mention the most obvious difference between this and for
instance nano or vim or jed: it's a *graphical* text editor.
> TEA provides you hundreds of functions. Want some tea?
Ungrammatical; you want "provides you with hundreds [...]"
I often suggest that package descriptions should explain the package's
name, but if TEA is really "Text Editor of the Atomic era" then maybe
that would just lead to more questions. I had hoped the Russian
manual might clarify things, but as far as I can see it's quite the
opposite.
> .
> TEA features are:
This sounds as if it's leading into a list of descriptions of TEA's
features (they're "numerous, powerful, and intuitive") rather than a
nonexhaustive catalogue of the features themselves. The simple fix is
to drop the "are", and leave "features" to be interpreted as a verb!
> * Spell checker (using aspell and hunspell)
Despite the ANDed Recommends line, s/and/or/, surely...
> * Tabbed layout engine
Add a mention of the Qt-based GUI.
> * Support for multiple encodings
This sounds like damning with faint praise by today's standards, but I
don't know the functionality it's referring to well enough to describe
it accurately.
> * Syntax highlighting
> * Code snippets and templates support
Nouns in attributive noun stacks like this usually don't take plural
endings (so I would expect "code snippet support" and "template
support"); but we can avoid the issue by rephrasing:
* Support for code snippets and templates
> * Wikipedia, DocBook, LaTeX, and Lout editing support
Say "editing support for" to contrast with the read-only support for
other formats in the following bulletpoint.
> * Reading of OpenDocument Text, SWX (old OpenOffice.org format),
> KWord, AbiWord, DOCX, Scribus, RTF, FB2
That probably needs some revision. For a start it isn't immediately
clear what this is a list of; and it isn't being consistent about how
it identifies them. When it says "KWord format", it doesn't mean the
format used by recent versions of KWord (which is ODT); it means the
antique native KWD format.
The simple solution would be just to do the same as you go on to do
for image formats below (note sorted order):
* reading support for text-based word processor formats (ABW, DOCX, FB2,
KWD, ODT, RTF, SLA, SWX)
> * Hotkeys customizations
Another attributive noun-stack; customisation of hotkeys is "hotkey
customisation".
> * "Open at cursor"-function for HTML-files and images
Surplus hyphens. But reading the docs I see this doesn't do what I
would have guessed - maybe it would be more intelligible as:
* "Open file at cursor" function from HTML href or img tags
> * Miscalleneous HTML tools
Typo: s/Miscalleneous/Miscellaneous/, and in fact by HTML it means
XML/XHTML/HTML.
> * Preview in external browsers
> * String-handling functions such as sorting, reverse, format killing,
> trimming, filtering, conversions etc.
s/reverse/reversing/; and I assume s/format killing/de-formatting/
(but what are "conversions"?)
> * Bookmarks
> * Drag'n'drop support (with text files and pictures)
> * Built-in image viewer (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WBMP, BMP, SVG)
Sort those formats: "(BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, WBMP)". And what sort
of order is this whole list of features in? Quite a few of them would
fit better with a bit of shuffling. Then since I'm editing so many
lines I might as well go ahead and impose the debian-l10n-english
house style on the punctuation of this list.
> Package: tea-data
> Architecture: all
> Depends: ${misc:Depends}
> Recommends: tea
> Description: text editor with syntax highlighting & UTF support (data files)
> TEA provides you hundreds of functions. Want some tea?
Edit these lines for consistency.
> .
> This package contains static data for the tea package. You can safely remove
> it when removing tea.
There's no need to tell sysadmins that automatically-installed
dependencies of manually-installed packages can be removed when the
useful app is removed (and hope they remember however many years later
it is when the situation arises) - the package management front-ends
will take care of that for us these days.
My revise
