Sam Vilain wrote:
On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 21:08 -0500, Ricardo SIGNES wrote:
* "Andreas J. Koenig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-11-07T17:29:50]
I will be very happy if you guys decide something and let me know.
I'll adjust the code for the forms on PAUSE then.
Here's my official vote:
(length $module_name + length $abstract + 3) should be under 80.
This means that the whole header and abstract will fit in one line.
That's more than 44 characters for short module names. Longer module
names, which should be pretty descriptive, need shorter abstracts.
Wombat - a framework for building reusable fruit-counting applications
Application::Framework::FruitCounting - for reusable produce applications
My feeling is that this wouldn't really work when the module name gets
too long, for example when a namespace under which you are contributing
has chosen verbose terms.
I agree. The maximum length of the abstract should be independent of
the length of the module's name.
But I also like one aspect of Mark Stosberg's suggestion: the
truncation of overly long abstracts in space-constrained formats. In
the body of a module's documentation, I don't really care how long an
abstract is. If the author is foolish enough to write an overly long
abstract, I'll simply ignore the module.
But where I do think ellipses should be used is in the tabular displays
of search.cpan.org. If, for example, the rule were formulated as "In
search.cpan.org and other CPAN search engines, abstracts will be
truncated starting after the 80th character," then -- going back to my
original question -- I could revise ExtUtils::ModuleMaker to warn the
user of the consequences of exceeding 80 characters (but not mandating
that length, as EU::MM can be used for non-CPAN modules where the space
constraint doesn't apply).
Jim Keenan
