Re: [gentoo-dev] Horrible package descriptions

[Matt Tucker <tuck@whistlingfish.net>]

-- "leon j. breedt" <ljb@neverborn.org> spake thusly:

> that said, I'm not sure how much use a long description would be to
> me. the DESCRIPTION, along with the category/group, give me enough of
> a context to be able to fill in the blanks for most ebuilds.  the only
> time I've actually read the description on other distributions was
> when browsing using a GUI tool :)

Keep in mind that another thing long descriptions are good for (as
Vadim pointed out in the original post) is something else to search
against. For instance, if I wanted to find something that plays
quicktime movies, I might search against 'quicktime'. Doing this on
Gentoo yields:

    libquicktime, openquicktime, quicktime4linux

which isn't really all that useful. If I search against the
description, (which takes far, FAR too long -- almost 2 minutes -- this
data really needs to be indexed), I get:

    libquicktime, openquicktime, quicktime4linux, xanim-export, xmovie

On Debian, I get:

    quicktime-x11utils, libquicktime1, xawtv-plugin-qt,
    libquicktime-dev, xmovie, dv-utils, dvgrab, xanim-modules,
    xawtv, xine-ui, kino, libxine1, libxine-dev, camstream,
    xanim, gnome-xine,

which shows quite a bit more, including a player that's worth using.
Sure, you could suggest that I formulate a better search, but often
this requires extra knowledge that a user may not have.

I recall that when I was running Debian and wanted to find a package
that did something I needed, I'd do 'apt-cache search'. On Gentoo I
usually end up going to Freshmeat or Google to find the package, and
then check to see whether there's an ebuild for it. This is not, in my
opinion, an ideal situation. It's particularly frustratring when just
getting started on Gentoo and trying to find all those tools you're
used to.


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