Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: length of the DESCRIPTION variable

[Mike Frysinger]

On Saturday 05 January 2008, Petteri Räty wrote:
> Petteri Räty kirjoitti:
> > Current devmanual suggest to not use line lengths over 80 characters.
> > http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/file-format/index.html
> >
> > I wrote a repoman check that checks that the value doesn't go over 80.
> > This is useful for tools like eix that show the DESCRIPTION. The thing
> > is that lots of ebuilds will fail this currently. Do you think we should
> > use a higher limit like 100? qualudis seems to use 120 currently.
>
> Seems devmanual is currently putting the limit to 80 too.
>
> http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/variables/index.html
>
> DESCRIPTION  	 A short (less than 80 characters) description of the
> package's purpose.

it's always been highly recommended that the DESCRIPTION be a short string, 
but there has never been a hard limit.  if you want to have repoman warn upon 
large strings (over 100 chars), that's fine, but there should be no hard 
limit anywhere.
-mike