Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo-x86 tree cleanup for 'DESCRIPTION ends with a '.' character' warnings

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 8:47 AM, hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> First, a sentence does not need to have a predicate. I know that for 99%
> sure in german and the english wikipedia article seems to suggest the
> same. Correct me if I am wrong.
>

In English your typical English class would teach that every sentence
must have a predicate.  From what Google tells me it technically isn't
entirely true, but every sentence generally does contain a verb.  So,
"library that implements SSL" is not a sentence under any
circumstances.

> Second, there are valid descriptions that are full ordinary sentences
> without referencing ${PN}:
> "Access a working SSH implementation by means of a library".
>
> In addition, repoman doesn't check for full sentences that reference
> ${PN}, such as:
> "Portage is the package management and distribution system for Gentoo".
>
> So we have another (useless) repoman warning with false positives.
>

Yeah, at best this seems a bit trivial.  Do we have a policy that
descriptions aren't allowed to be complete sentences?  Many of our
developers are not native English speakers in the first place, so
striving for grammatical perfection is a bit optimistic.  On top of
that, repoman certainly isn't a native English speaker, so expecting
it to achieve grammatical perfection is a really tall order.  And
please don't suggest making languagetool a dependency for portage...

I don't have a problem with QA recommending new tree policies, but if
they're going to do this the QA team ought to first ensure that the
team agrees (however they want to govern that), and then communicate
the policy before implementing it.  I'd also implement it in
documentation before doing so in repoman, otherwise we're going to
have a repoman full of 800 rules whose origin is a mystery.  I'm fine
with QA policies going into effect by default, but communicating them
allows objections to be raised and an appeal made to Council if
necessary before we get too far along.  This isn't just about due
process - it is hard for developers to even comply with a policy they
are unaware of.

Rich