Re: Synchronizing synopses with the Womb

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

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    For Nano, Iœôòùm not sure it makes sense to mention Pico (Pico wasnœôòùt free,
    right?); instead we have "A small, user-friendly console text editor".

Agreed.  Except, trivial, there is no need for "A" here.  So I changed
it to:

doc-summary: Small, user-friendly console text editor

The other one is more problematic, though I certainly don't feel
absolutist about it.

    For gdbm, œôòühash libraryœôòý seems misleading, and I think the word
    œôòüdatabaseœôòý must appear; 

Because I put it in category Database?  Maybe that was wrong and the
more generic "Software libraries" would be better.

    I would suggest: œôòüKey/value database libraryœôòý.

Looking at it now ... to me, gdbm is precisely *not* a database, in the
sense of, say, postgresql or mysql or sqlite.  And thus using the term
in the description would be more confusing than helpful?

The other things I put in the Database category
(http://www.gnu.org/manual/#Database) all seem to be actual programs,
not just libraries.

Looking again at the gdbm web page (which is where I started), it starts
with:
    gdbm ... a library of database functions that use extensible hashing
    and work similar to the standard UNIX dbm.

So how about:
doc-summary: Hash library of database functions compatible with traditional dbm

I think the dbm reference is important, because many Unix programmers
and programs have heard of dbm and ndbm and will immediately know
exactly what it is.

I can't say I'm enthused about verbose "key/value" instead of "hash" --
are we not allowed to use technical terms any more :)?  Either would be
ok, but key/value will make my line >79 chars :).


However, it's more important to me that we come up with something we can
both live with than insisting on any particular point, so let me know.

Thanks,
Karl

P.S. Did you talk with Brandon about synchronizing the guix/gsrc
long(er) descriptions?  He was going to write you ...