Re: [gentoo-dev] About DESCRIPTION in ebuilds needing to end with a dot "."

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, 2012-10-19 at 21:01 +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> Hello
> 
> At least in spanish, it's mandatory to end phrases with a dot ".", would
> you agree with trying to enforce this trivial change with a repoman
> warning?
> 
> Thanks for your opinions

In English, it is also mandatory to end sentences in "."

But package DESCRIPTION strings are almost never complete sentences; in
the vast majority of cases, they are just titles that are noun phrases
grammatically, and therefore do not need a "."

For example, nobody would call descriptions of gcc ("The GNU Compiler
Collection"), libX11 ("X.Org X11 library"), or polkit ("Policy framework
for controlling privileges for system-wide services") complete English
sentences. For one thing, they don't have verbs.

Some packages do have DESCRIPTIONs that are complete sentences
grammatically: x11-libs/qt, for example, has "The Qt toolkit is a
comprehensive C++ application development framework." (and it ends in a
".") So for those cases, the ebuild maintainers could append "." if they
want to. But even then, I would not make something this trivial into a
requirement.