Chat with bubulle

debian debtags eng pdo

These are a few notes from a chat with Bubulle about package descriptions.

Check a description against keywords

To see what packages would match certain keywords, and how:

ept-cache dumpavail keyword1 keyword2 | grep-dctrl -sPackage,Search-Score .

To check how much a package would match certain keywords:

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#!/bin/sh
PACKAGE=$1
shift
ept-cache dumpavail "$@" | grep-dctrl -sSearch-Score -FPackage -X $PACKAGE

Technical details in the descriptions

The programming language used to implement the software and the X UI toolit used by the software can also be removed from descriptions: Debtags offer a better place to store this information, and most package managers now show tags together with the package description.

Submitting descriptions for review

Submitting descriptions for review to the Smith Review Project means posting them to the publicly archived debian-l10n-english mailing list, and that may turn off some.

It would also be interesting to change the description template generated by debhelper to mention the Smith Review Project and a link to description guidelines

Description guidelines

There are various description guidelines that could use consolidation and eventually inclusion in the Developers Reference.

For example, Writing package descriptions is a very good guide, but most of the unsolved issues at the end have actually now been solved by the Smith Review Project.