Jonathan McDowell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb: > On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 03:34:45PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote: >> Jonathan McDowell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb: >> > On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 12:17:20PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote: >> >> To my taste, this description contains too many abbreviations, and is >> >> only understandable for someone who already knows what they mean. Please >> >> follow the general guidelines for descriptions, >> > "The package description should be written for the average likely user" >> > >> > The average likely user should know what L2TP is and understand the >> > LNSes role in this. >> No, I don't think so. I think that "the average likely user" is meant >> to be an average user of Debian, not the user of the package. This is >> logical, because the purpose of the description is to allow a user to >> decide whether he *is* the target user of the package. > > If the user doesn't understand the package description, is it not > reasonable to assume they'll work out it's probably not for them?
No, it is not reasonable. There *are* lots of crappy^Wbad descriptions around, and for a user it is, unfortunately, very reasonable to assume that the solution to her/his problem lies in a package whose descriptions she doesn't understand at all. Your package would add one more that she'd have to check. > If I > went searching for something and found a handful of packages, some of > which had many terms I didn't understand while the others did, I'd > assume that some of the packages weren't appropriate to what I wanted. Or that they had simply bad descriptions. > Must we dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator rather > than assuming our users have some level of intellegence? This is not a question of intelligence. If you don't know anything about chemistry, but you want to buy a chemistry experimentation kit for your 14 year old son or daughter (who is fond of chemistry and has yet read lots of books), shouldn't the box of the kit tell _you_ whether it makes sense to buy this one, or whether it will be much too easy or dangerous for him/her? If you don't understand it - do you have a problem with your intelligence? No. Don't take this as an analogy for your package description - there might be packages an admin installs on user request without knowing them, but yours is not one of these. But take it as a hint that it is not about intelligence. > Would you be satisfied with "This package is not intended for users who > want to setup a local dialup or similar connection; you probably want > the ppp package instead." as the first paragraph of the description? Or > perhaps "This package is aimed at those who need to terminate a large > number of L2TP sessions; if you're a home user you probably want the ppp > package". Yes, that would be appropriate. Andreas suggestion sounds even better to me, because it is not longer, but has the additional information what L2TPNS is. > I'm sorry, I disagree. PPP and ISP are commonly used terms and L2TP/LNS > should be familiar to the users of the package. Yes, PPP and ISP are common (although ISP is much less common for non-english speaking users). But if, by the will of the gods of regexp matching, a package shows up in a totally different context, the abbreviations might have a totally different meaning in that context. If an abbreviation can be avoided, it should be. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
