Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add bedtools

[John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>]

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On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 11:06:15AM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
     
     John Darrington writes:
     
     > I suggest that in the description and particularly in the synopsis fields you
     > avoid persiflage like "swiss-army knife".  It doesn't add any information, and
     > only goes to increase the noise.
     >
     > (The same goes for phrases such as "high quality", "powerful" and "state of the art").
     >
     > J'
     >
     > On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 05:37:16PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
     >      * gnu/packages/bioinformatics.scm (bedtools): New variable.
     >
     >      +    (synopsis "Swiss army knife for genome arithmetic")
     >      +    (description
     >      +     "Collectively, the bedtools utilities are a swiss-army knife of tools for
     >      +a wide-range of genomics analysis tasks.  The most widely-used tools enable
     >      +genome arithmetic: that is, set theory on the genome.  For example, bedtools
     >      +allows one to intersect, merge, count, complement, and shuffle genomic
     >      +intervals from multiple files in widely-used genomic file formats such as BAM,
     >      +BED, GFF/GTF, VCF.")
     
     I do agree.  I sheepishly copied the synopsis and description from the
     project website and I wasn't quite satisfied either.  Do you have a
     suggestion?  "Tools for performing genome arithmetic", maybe?
     
Without knowing the package I cannot say.  But I presume that "Swiss Army Knife" is supposed
to imply that there are various tools of differing purposes.

So perhaps "Miscellaneous tools for performing genome arithmetic"?   On the 
other hand, unless there is some other package which contains some specialised tools for one
special branch of genome arithmetic, then the word "miscellaneous" is redundant and simply
 "Tools for performing genome arithmetic"  like you suggested would be best.  It is short and 
to the point as the synopsis should be.

J'

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