[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions

andre999 andr55 at laposte.net
Tue Oct 26 07:22:52 CEST 2010


Kira a écrit :
>
> 在 Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:59:25 +0800, Marc Paré <marc at marcpare.com>寫道:
>> I think that it is pretty clear that packagers don't really want to 
>> deal with updating description, but the users would like to have 
>> updated descriptions. So, what if there was a group of users in 
>> charge of updating the package descriptions/translations where 
>> needed? Would this work?
> The problem is that currently if we want to translate the description, 
> then
>
> we have to modify the SPEC of the RPM, which can only be done with 
> packager.
>
> Like the previous messages, we have 2 methods to choose:
>
> 1 .po files for 1 package
>
>     or
>
> 1 .po files for multiple packages
>
> The first one would cause many .po files to maintain, while the other
>
> cause the maintainence hard( too complicate).
> ====
> I think maybe a more aggresive way is better:
>
> Make the detailed description available only for programs, not packages.
>
> Currently the RPMDRAKE is packages based, which is hard for newbies to 
> find
>
> programs they need and the amount of the description need to maintain 
> also scares
>
> everyone off.
>
>  The "Programs with GUI" option is the first step, but I think we 
> should step further,
>
> let people install programs, not packages. Therefore, we can ease both 
> the difficulty
>
> of maintain descriptions and installation harsh.

I don't quite follow this distinction of programs and packages.
A package is a file with installation instructions for a program, or a 
set of closely related programs.  Sometimes a program with many modules 
is divided into more than one package, but then there are one or more 
core packages, essential to the installation of the others.
So maybe some packages would need minimal documentation since they are 
dependant on a core package (e.g. OpenOffice).
But if considering installing a package containing a number of closely 
related programs, wouldn't one want all the contained programs to be 
documented ?
Since they would almost necessarily be complementary ?
And if you install only one program at a time, essentially you are 
saying that each package contains exactly one program.  So you want 37 
packages to install Openoffice ?  And you want 4 or 5 packages instead 
of one for the diff (file comparison) utilities ?

By the way, if newbies are scared off by packages, why is the Microsoft 
environment package oriented ?
(Even though often a package of numerous programs is referred to as a 
program.)

In any case, a documentation group which takes care of the package 
description and localisation, done in a collorative online environment, 
such that the package descriptions can be automatically included in 
created packages, is a very workable solution.
This is basically applying the documentation and translation process of 
many major open source projects to package description.

my 2 cents :)
- André



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