RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

[James Antill]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 10:22 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nah, it's nonsense to even try listing the supported video formats
> > in the summary if you can list them in the longer and detailed
> > description. What about MVCD,XVCD,XSVCD,RSVCD,TVCD,TSVCD and others?
> > The short summary simply cannot answer a lot of questions the user
> > might have.
> 
> yes... this level of detail is part of the ingredient and side effects
> listing on the side of the medicine bottle.
> 
> You know what would be interesting.  What if each character in the
> summary had a real cost associated with it... but the description did
> not... and it was in the packagers and users benefit to use the space
> sparingly.   What if for example the UI deliberately tried to put
> packages with the shortest Summary first in a search listing.  Would
> that put enough value on a concise summary without stripping it of
> essential meaning or value as a text string?

 Yes, because the best possible end game is if all summaries say "does
stuff".

 Now sure, I think there are probably some packages that have less than
optimal summaries ... but I'm not sure length is the most significant
factor. For instance the yum package summary could probably be better,
but I'd bet that'll be by _adding_ characters.
 The fact that a single tool decided that summaries should be used
instead of names, and so summaries should be roughly the same size of
names shouldn't make Fedora packages break their summaries for other
tools ... all IMO.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora