Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:55:36PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> If I remember correctly, DDTP got a short mention and the result was:
> "Wow, debian really has translations for package descriptions?!?"
> Other distributions seem to have only failed (=very outdated) tries if any.

IMHO this does show two things:
  1. Debian is cool (people here know this). ;-)
  2. Debian fails to communicate this coolness. :-(
 
> AppStream focuses on translations of the name, keywords and (short)
> summary managed by upstream. We talked shortly about longer descriptions
> (possibly with markdown) but this would easily blow up the currently
> rather small app-data.xml similar to how the long descriptions are quiet
> a big part of our Packages files currently - beside the problem: Who will
> write these descriptions: Upstream is not necessarily the best author…

The question is: What is a "short" summary.  From my packaging
experience the first shot what we call "long description" is an snippet
from the homepage of a project (by stripping of some redundancies and
pure advertising stuff).  It ends up in a one to three paragraphs text
which easily can be turned into Markdown formatted text.  I'm using this
on the Debian Blends pages (see example below [1]) and because the
translations are in the same format they can be easily plugged in (the
example [1] is using translations into more than 10 languages ... if
available in DDTP)

For the content itself: I agree that upstream is not necessarily the
best author but I assume that maintainers in other dists are doing it
quite similar to waht we do in Debian: Revise a text from upstream or
try to invent one.  So the descriptions are there - we just need to
define what a "good" (short) description is (there are bad examples
as well[2])
 
> So translated long descriptions are currently out of the (shared) scope,
> as we simple can't discuss everything in two and a half days, but to add
> another quote: "It's xml, so we can add anything we like/need later".

Sure.  My point was:  We (as in Debian) should increase our translation
infrastructure to put it on a solid and reliable basis so once the
App-Store effort comes to the point of seeking translations for including
in their format we can simply provide the content.
 
> I guess the DDTP project will be part of follow-up discussions as it is
> similar to debtags and screenshots - its more or less the only working
> solution - and you are right: all of them are badly needed.

Yes.

Kind regards and thanks for the App-Store effort and cross-distro
discussion

      Andreas.
 

[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio 
[2] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/typesetting

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