Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 04:57:07 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: ports@freebsd.org Subject: Porters: Please shorten your "one line comments" a little if you can! Message-ID: <199510221157.EAA22000@time.cdrom.com>
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As most of you no doubt know, the 2.1 installer now has an option to load packages. Given that screen real-estate and the types of "GUI" objects I have are so limited, I'm noticing that many of the one-liner descriptions are being seriously truncated, and in many cases for no reason. I say "no reason" because looking at the comment in question will generally show lots of white space, poor use of the language, etc. The new packages menu is a cool thing and I think that many people will like it, but remember: How nice your ports entry looks on the menu is sort of up to you! If you chose a terse, descriptive name then it will look good on the menu. If not, well.. Some examples: Good: mshell-1.0 Mshell: a Unix menuing shell Bad: amanda-2.2.6 Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network D As you can see, the latter was trucated at "D", giving the user no idea really what kind of automatic network utility it is! :-) I also realize that most of you never knew that there was any kind of limitation on comment lines and so I'm not ragging on the guy who produced the Amanda port - I'm sure he was perfectly reasonably motivated to expand the "AMANDA" acronym correctly and all, but it just doesn't fit and it's not very descriptive for the number of words used besides. Far better would be something like: amanda-2.2.6 An automated network dump tool Also, the package name and its one-liner will also always be printed together, so lines like: ical-1.9 ical-1.9 -- Ical is a calendar application Contain a lot of redundant information. We know it's ical and we know it's version 1.9 from the name syntax now, so "A calendar application" would have done just as well! :-) Anyway, it shouldn't take long to go on a pkg/COMMENT rampage and adjust these en-masse if everybody pitches in. I'll grep for my own ports and make sure I don't embarass myself.. :-) The end result will be a MUCH more professional looking package menu (and WEB pages), I'm sure you'll agree! Thanks! Jordan
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