Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo-x86 tree cleanup for 'DESCRIPTION ends with a '.' character' warnings
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 13:26:14
Message-Id: CAGfcS_nBN7sjsJxa+72MY7VAt=AQ8UqvTRmD2cqr=RKeKDoFOg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo-x86 tree cleanup for 'DESCRIPTION ends with a '.' character' warnings by hasufell
1 On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 8:47 AM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > First, a sentence does not need to have a predicate. I know that for 99%
4 > sure in german and the english wikipedia article seems to suggest the
5 > same. Correct me if I am wrong.
6 >
7
8 In English your typical English class would teach that every sentence
9 must have a predicate. From what Google tells me it technically isn't
10 entirely true, but every sentence generally does contain a verb. So,
11 "library that implements SSL" is not a sentence under any
12 circumstances.
13
14 > Second, there are valid descriptions that are full ordinary sentences
15 > without referencing ${PN}:
16 > "Access a working SSH implementation by means of a library".
17 >
18 > In addition, repoman doesn't check for full sentences that reference
19 > ${PN}, such as:
20 > "Portage is the package management and distribution system for Gentoo".
21 >
22 > So we have another (useless) repoman warning with false positives.
23 >
24
25 Yeah, at best this seems a bit trivial. Do we have a policy that
26 descriptions aren't allowed to be complete sentences? Many of our
27 developers are not native English speakers in the first place, so
28 striving for grammatical perfection is a bit optimistic. On top of
29 that, repoman certainly isn't a native English speaker, so expecting
30 it to achieve grammatical perfection is a really tall order. And
31 please don't suggest making languagetool a dependency for portage...
32
33 I don't have a problem with QA recommending new tree policies, but if
34 they're going to do this the QA team ought to first ensure that the
35 team agrees (however they want to govern that), and then communicate
36 the policy before implementing it. I'd also implement it in
37 documentation before doing so in repoman, otherwise we're going to
38 have a repoman full of 800 rules whose origin is a mystery. I'm fine
39 with QA policies going into effect by default, but communicating them
40 allows objections to be raised and an appeal made to Council if
41 necessary before we get too far along. This isn't just about due
42 process - it is hard for developers to even comply with a policy they
43 are unaware of.
44
45 Rich

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