[csw-maintainers] Suggested description check for checkpkg

[Peter FELECAN]

Peter Bonivart <bonivart at opencsw.org> writes:

> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> I'm not so fond of this kind of restrictions. Parser can be made
>> "smarter" at small cost...
>
> The cost can grow when others find ways to demand "smarter" parsers.
> What I found today was unexpected, what's it gonna be tomorrow? ;-)

The issue, as with many checkers is that their author tries to implement
everything in a single parser, which has a tendency to have very complex
ones. In my experience, is better to have a "herd of parsers" (TM) each
one specialized on a quite simple domain.

> What I suggested is a new check in checkpkg and all of those can be
> overridden if needed. If a maintainer got such errors he could
> probably in every case replace " - " with ", " and "::" with "-".

In textual representation using the ASCII code the dash is used in place
of the "long dash", e.g. in TeX represented with ---. Many times, this
construct can be represented with parenthesis, semi-column or even
comma. However, if somebody takes the description of a package as
canonically represented in the upstream the thing get unnecessarily
complex.

> Here's the complete list: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/311358/ (don't
> mind the "classification")

Quite a mess but the description is a "free" content attribute of a
package.

Discussing the overrides, how are they functioning, as arguments of the
checker or are they managed in the gar's Makefile? This shows that I'm
not familiar with gar or checkpkg (Python version)...
-- 
Peter