Re: [PATCH] gnu packages: Clean up synopses and descriptions.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès (2015-07-16 22:08 +0300) wrote:

[...]

>> The problem is that this rule sometimes conflicts with the
>> ‘gnu-description’ checker (aka. ‘make sync-descriptions’), which checks
>> upstream GNU descriptions.
>>
>> When such conflicts happen, we should give precedence to the GNU
>> descriptions.
>
> Oh, I see now.  But should we really give precedence to the GNU
> descriptions?  For example, "guix lint libffcall" says that the proposed
> description is "null (stale)".

That’s a bug on our side: It means there’s no upstream description,
basically.

> Since we have our own conventions that are not necessarily coincide with
> the upstream conventions, I believe it would be better to prefer our
> synopses/descriptions instead.

I discussed with Karl Berry and Brandon Invergo who take care of it to
make sure we have roughly the same rules.  I’ve also adjusted ‘guix
lint’ accordingly (see notably 105c260.)

So I think we should keep using them and email address@hidden when we
want a change (see <https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-womb>.)

> And I think it would be good to adjust "guix lint" to avoid redundant
> reports.  For example, with the current (GNU) synopsis, "guix lint
> hello" says:
>
>   … hello-2.10: synopsis should not start with the package name
>
> With the modified synopsis, it would be:
>
>   … hello-2.10: proposed synopsis: "Hello, GNU world: An example GNU package"
>
> So no matter what variant is preferable ('synopsis' or
> 'gnu-description'), we have a warning.
>
> I see that it's not a trivial change as lint-checkers are independent.
> Perhaps there may be added some priorities, so when a stronger linter is
> passed successfully, then there is no need to check for weaker linters.
> (Sorry if it's not appropriate, it's just a not-very-well-formed idea :-))

Yes that would be ideal, and yes that’s non-trivial.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.