On 5/14/07, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: > Peter Tribble wrote: > > Questions for the install community really: > > > > - do we have this sort of verbose and user-friendly descriptions available > > for packages? > > > > - would this go into the pkginfo file (I think this would be rather > > difficult)? > > > > - if this doesn't go into the pkginfo file is there some other pre-existing > > standard file to hold it, or would inventing something new be necessary? > > > > It would have to be localized as well, so there would be quite a lot of > > work in getting nice descriptions. > > The DESC field in the pkginfo file is more or less this, though it has > limitations that limit the richness of the description. It doesn't have > any direct provision for localization, though.
Thanks, and that's what I thought. Having read a fair number of pkginfo files that are shipped with Solaris, it's generally true that the NAME field supplies a reasonably short description suitable for use as a tooltip, in a tabular list of packages, or as a title of a description. And the DESC field is a slight expansion on that. Only slight though, in many cases (and often uncapitalized). Looking through other sources - the S10 companion I looked at has NAME and DESC mostly the same; Studio 11 seems to have DESC be NAME with the string "Studio 11" chopped out; as far as I can tell blastwave doesn't use DESC at all. One of the best examples of doing this well was the VRTSnetbp package: NAME=VERITAS NetBackup and Media Manager DESC=NetBackup provides backup and restore services for client systems and the management of storage devices and media. Media Manager has device and media management components for handling tapes drives, optical disks, and robotic libraries. We have 256 characters to play with, which should be enough (the above example is 238 or so, just within the limit). As you say, there's no direct provision for localization. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
