Hi,
On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 10:54:11AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 05:39:40PM +0200, Sam Hocevar wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 18, 2003, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> > > Ugh. Since when does the developer's reference recommend this? The
> > > article most definitely belongs...
>
> > It is in 6.2.2:
> >
> > Since the synopsis is a clause, rather than a
> > full sentence, we recommend that it neither start with a capital nor
> > end with a full stop (period). It should also not begin with an
> > article, either definite ("the") or indefinite ("a" or "an").
> >
> > It might help to imagine that the synopsis is combined with the
> > package name in the following way:
>
> > <package-name> is a <synopsis>.
>
> Grammatically, the article is part of the clause. This recommendation
> is inconsistent.
"Since the synopsis is part of a clause..." would probably be better,
sure.
Also, "<package name> contains <synopsis>" could be suggested as a
template, see descriptions such as "header files for package xyz" or
"ABC support files", "development files", "KDE core applications", etc.
But in any case, no article seems to be the norm:
$ grep '^Description:' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
9025
$ grep '^Description: [Aa][n ]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
1163
at least on woody, with just a few small extra repositories. The
lowercase recommendation seems much less followed:
$ grep '^Description: [A-Z]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
7661
$ grep '^Description: [a-z]' /var/lib/dpkg/available | wc -l
1262
Cheers,
Emile.
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