[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions

Tux99 tux99-mga at uridium.org
Sun Oct 24 04:40:26 CEST 2010


On Sun, 24 Oct 2010, Michael Scherer wrote:

> I think I demonstrated in the past that constant friendliness toward
> users is not one of my distinctive characteristics. 

Well, that might have been fine as a Mandriva employee, but as part of a 
community distro I personally consider you attitude out of place and not 
in line with the spirit of Mageia.

> If writing a decent description is easy and almost effortless, and if
> sending a email is easy, then what is difficult into doing both ?

You don't even need to write a description, usually you can just 
copy&paste it from the web site of the software.
Thing is, if the packager does it it's a 1 minute job, if some user 
emails it to him, the packager still has to check the description and 
then paste it into the spec file, so it saves no time at all.

> We could rely on the packagers for everything, but 1) that doesn't scale
> 2) that doesn't work.

With all due respect, but when talking about a simple description for 
each package this is nonsense.

> And that doesn't work because packagers ( at least me ) most of the time
> do not read descriptions, so they do not see something is wrong.

What descriptions do you not read?
The ones of Fedora spec files you simply copy&paste?

> Managing and knowing softwares is our duty, which place use in a
> position far away from someone that discover the system.

Exactly because the packager knows the software he/she packages, it's 
easiest for her/him to add a suitable description.

> Kde had 3 majors releases since I started to use Linux, so of course 
> the packages descriptions change, yet I didn't read them since years. 

I don't understand your point, you surely didn't use the same spec 
files for most kde4 packages as for kde3?

> So again, why does people do not send improved description ?

Finding who the correct packager is, isn't trivial at all, the changelog 
often contains various names and the Mdv web site packager list often 
doesn't match the names in the spec file.

I tell you what:

If I will have full access to all spec files as a Mageia packager, I 
will myself add descriptions to many packages if others don't mind, I 
don't have a problem with that as long as I can do it directly myself, 
without having to contact each fellow packager first.

But if I have to find the email of the packager for each package that 
has a bad or missing description then I won't bother, that would be a 
waste of everyone's time.



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