RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 08:17 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 16:12 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 09:56 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >>> Josh Boyer (jwboyer at gmail.com) said: 
> >>>>> It would also be a good idea to have a few "shining examples" for people
> >>>>> to copy when creating new packages. When we've done that, I'll start
> >>>>> filing bugs.
> >>>> Just file bugs for packages you think are overly verbose.  Offer
> >>>> alternate summaries in the bug, and a URL to your email for
> >>>> rationale.
> >>> I'm not sure this scales across 5000 packages. So it would be good
> >>> to have at least *something* in the guidelines.
> >> Well, the FPG is intentionally lax on %summary's, because we had wanted
> >> to avoid getting lot in endless discussions on something which is
> >> technically widely meaningness.
> > 
> > Right, but maybe we could have a soft guideline such as:
> > 
> > * Summary should aim to be less than 8 words
> > 
> I generally dislike soft guidelines.  Instead of the Packaging Committee
> making a controversial decisions that contributors argue about, it
> becomes the individual reviewers and packagers arguing about it on many
> separate bugs....
Correct.

> Which is not to say that I wouldn't vote for such a thing, just that I
> usually ask:
> 1) Why can this not be a hard guideline?  (In this case, because it's
> something that's better left to the packager).
Because %summary's are technically irrelevant. 

It's free form one-liner text - Not more, not less.

> 2) Why should this be part of the review guidelines, then?  (So one GUI
> tool can better support its interface).
Any GUI tools must take %summary's as what they are: A one-liner string.

Any GUI tool treating it as something else is simply overinterpreting 
%summary.

Ralf