On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 10:32:56AM +1000, Ben Woodcroft wrote: > On 09/23/2016 10:15 AM, Leo Famulari wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 12:59:51PM +0200, John Darrington wrote: > > > I thought we had a policy that the synopsis field must not > > > start with an article. > > > > > > However running > > > grep 'synopsis *"The' *.scm > > > > > > shows that we have many instances where this policy is > > > not followed. > > > > > > Or have I misunderstood something? > > It's a minor issue. I think that making many small changes throughout > > the master branch will be too disruptive for what is a relatively minor > > style issue. > This is true even though changing a description doesn't trigger a rebuild?
I figured that there were hundreds of instances, but checking for "A" and "An" (what `guix lint` checks for), it's only 8 packages. So I don't think this change will be disruptive. My comment about the change being "disruptive" was not about rebuilding but rather code "churn". And non-functional code churn does seem worth the human time required to merge hundreds of conflicts. Is there a reason to remove "The"? I think it would not always be an improvement, for example in a case like this: (synopsis "The Erlang programming language") > > If the change is made, I'd prefer it on core-updates. Merging master > > into core-updates and vice versa already requires somebody to resolve a > > lot of merge conflicts. I'd rather not add to that burden. > Do you have any recommendations for changing our practices to ease this > issue? One idea is to do big widespread non-functional changes between core-updates branches. That is, immediately after a release is tagged, before a new core-updates branch is required.
