John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> writes: > The point is some of us don't like using scroll lock to back up to see > the description that unexpectedly scrolled off. 24 lines is generous; > I'd personally limit it to 20. I don't think the scroll lock issue is relevant, but I agree with the notion that DESCR should be short. It's not meant to be documentation for the package; it should describe the package well enough for someone to figure out whether to investigate further or ignore it. It's very much like an abstract of a paper. I find that a lot of DESCR content is verbose and goofy, and reads like content-free marketing text. So the real reason to be short is that you might want to e.g. read all DESCR in geography to see what you want to play with. I think a 100-line DESCR (or even 50) is a bad one, and I haven't found an example that justifies such verbosity. So if a human is summarizing them (and esp. making them more level-headed and useful), I think that's good.
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