From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: Definite article in synopsis Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 11:28:14 +0900 Message-ID: <87eg4af2v5.fsf@gnu.org> References: <20160921105951.GA22975@jocasta.intra> <20160923001551.GE12170@jasmine> <6d27b754-5fa2-1fda-8d0a-431ef224b7ef@uq.edu.au> <20160923051017.GA17132@jasmine> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:39162) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bncks-0003go-Ad for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 23 Sep 2016 22:31:57 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bnckr-0002yM-AG for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 23 Sep 2016 22:31:54 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20160923051017.GA17132@jasmine> (Leo Famulari's message of "Fri, 23 Sep 2016 01:10:17 -0400") 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: Leo Famulari Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org Hello! Leo Famulari skribis: > 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. >> > >=20 >> > > However running >> > > grep 'synopsis *"The' *.scm >> > >=20 >> > > shows that we have many instances where this policy is >> > > not followed. >> > >=20 >> > > 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 rebuil= d? > > 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. I think it=E2=80=99s OK to have occasional =E2=80=9Cchurn=E2=80=9D like thi= s, but I agree that we must make sure to always make such changes on the same branch to avoid merge conflicts; =E2=80=98master=E2=80=99 is OK, both =E2=80=98master= =E2=80=99 and =E2=80=98core-updates=E2=80=99 is not OK. > 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") I think the rationale was that it=E2=80=99s often an indication that the synopsis starts a sentence, but I agree that in some cases this rule doesn=E2=80=99t work. >> > 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. I would tend to think of =E2=80=98master=E2=80=99 as the branch for non-fun= ctional changes like this. But the key is to make sure such wide changes are kept in a single branch to avoid merge issues as you wrote. WDYT? Thanks, Ludo=E2=80=99.