Note that whatever we decide on, I'll probably have to change something, as most of my packages are adopted, and have little or no consistency in how their descriptions are written. I think this allows me to be fairly unbiased, as I can't really argue for the way my packages currently are, just in order to avoid the need to change them.
On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 09:06:04PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote: > To make up for this (in addition to the fact that I'm working on #134106 > at the moment :) ), I'd like to add something new to the discussion. I > assert that the short descriptions are not titles nor sentence fragments > per se; rather they are subtitles, like for a book. I am uncomfortable with this view. A title (or subtitle) is capitalized the way it is because it is, more or less, a proper name. A name may be descriptive, or it may be merely evocative or suggestive, or none of the above. We want descriptive, not merely evocative or suggestive, and certainly not none of the above. "Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb": here the subtitle is definitely evocative, but not very descriptive. A package might have an official upstream subtitle (something like, "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"), and that's probably not what we want. We want a short description. Really we do. So, I think that's what we should ask for. Most short descriptions follow the template: <packagename> is a(n) <short-description> That's not the rule subtitles follow, because titles (sub or otherwise) are names, not (necessarily) descriptions. More practically, as Branden points out, it's easier to add capitalization in a display program than it is to take it away. To add capitalization, you merely need to filter a handful of small words that don't get capitalized. To take away capitalization, you need to know every proper name and every acronym that might be used in a description (because these shouldn't get de-capitalized). So, to summarize, treating the short description as a sentence fragment (or, my preference, as a noun clause) is both more correct (IMO), and results in a more flexible system. Thinking about this has inspired me to come up with an official subtitle for WMRack (which I'm currently upstream for): "The Wonderful, Magical Rack of Sound Bytes". I think it's a fine subtitle, but I do not think it would be an appropriate short description. I hope you all agree. cheers -- Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long [EMAIL PROTECTED] | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single or [EMAIL PROTECTED] | volcaniconi- standalone haiku -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
