From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Leo Famulari Subject: Re: Definite article in synopsis Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 01:10:17 -0400 Message-ID: <20160923051017.GA17132@jasmine> References: <20160921105951.GA22975@jocasta.intra> <20160923001551.GE12170@jasmine> <6d27b754-5fa2-1fda-8d0a-431ef224b7ef@uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:37440) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bnIkt-0001Ad-5y for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 23 Sep 2016 01:10:36 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bnIko-0007DN-Q0 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 23 Sep 2016 01:10:34 -0400 Received: from out2-smtp.messagingengine.com ([66.111.4.26]:43165) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bnIkn-0007An-DL for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 23 Sep 2016 01:10:30 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <6d27b754-5fa2-1fda-8d0a-431ef224b7ef@uq.edu.au> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Ben Woodcroft Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 10:32:56AM +1000, Ben Woodcroft wrote: > On 09/23/2016 10:15 AM, Leo Famulari wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 12:59:51PM +0200, John Darrington wrote: > > > I thought we had a policy that the synopsis field must not > > > start with an article. > > > > > > However running > > > grep 'synopsis *"The' *.scm > > > > > > shows that we have many instances where this policy is > > > not followed. > > > > > > Or have I misunderstood something? > > It's a minor issue. I think that making many small changes throughout > > the master branch will be too disruptive for what is a relatively minor > > style issue. > This is true even though changing a description doesn't trigger a rebuild? I figured that there were hundreds of instances, but checking for "A" and "An" (what `guix lint` checks for), it's only 8 packages. So I don't think this change will be disruptive. My comment about the change being "disruptive" was not about rebuilding but rather code "churn". And non-functional code churn does seem worth the human time required to merge hundreds of conflicts. Is there a reason to remove "The"? I think it would not always be an improvement, for example in a case like this: (synopsis "The Erlang programming language") > > If the change is made, I'd prefer it on core-updates. Merging master > > into core-updates and vice versa already requires somebody to resolve a > > lot of merge conflicts. I'd rather not add to that burden. > Do you have any recommendations for changing our practices to ease this > issue? One idea is to do big widespread non-functional changes between core-updates branches. That is, immediately after a release is tagged, before a new core-updates branch is required.