Re: Worthless descriptions for almost all of the recent node-* ITPs (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)

2017-01-06 Thread Holger Levsen 
Hi Praveen,

On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 10:16:37AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> Hi Praveen,
> 
> I assume that all these ITPs are prompted by your crowd-funding effort.
> 
> Today we have #850399 which plumbs new depths in that it has had both
> long and short descriptions trimmed from the body of the message.
> 
> Please would you take responsibility for your packaging team by
> instructing them that it is simply unacceptable to have these packages
> with such useless descriptions.
> 
> The fact that they all seem to be trimming off the FIX_ME that npm2deb
> includes for them, and are thus also removing the explanation of what
> Node.js is, seems like vandalism to me.  Did you tell them to do that,
> or are they learning that from one another?
> 
> TBH I find this whole approach rather worrying.
> 
>   Are you paying these people for their efforts?
> 
>   Are we supposed to expect them to remain interested in these packages
>   when the money dries up?
> 
>   If not, what is the plan for providing maintenance for these packages
>   for the time that they are going to be in stable?
> 
> Cheers, Phil.
> 
> P.S. While you're at it, I would suggest that you encourage your
> packaging team to contact the upstreams in order to discover whether
> they are happy for their current release to be preserved in Debian
> stable -- I can imagine that some of them might be unhappy with the
> prospect of having the latest release packaged, if there are bug fixes
> in the HEAD that they don't want bug reports about for the next 5 years.
> They could then push out a release quickly and you could package that
> instead.

fully seconded, after reading #850399 (no description at all) and #850398
and #850397 just now (and many similar useless descriptions before), I'm
really curious for your answers to Philip's question above.

   Are you paying these people for their efforts?
 
   Are we supposed to expect them to remain interested in these packages
   when the money dries up?
 
   If not, what is the plan for providing maintenance for these packages
   for the time that they are going to be in stable?

Please elaborate.


-- 
cheers,
Holger


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Re: Worthless descriptions for almost all of the recent node-* ITPs (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)

2017-01-06 Thread Philip Hands 
Hi Praveen,

I assume that all these ITPs are prompted by your crowd-funding effort.

Today we have #850399 which plumbs new depths in that it has had both
long and short descriptions trimmed from the body of the message.

Please would you take responsibility for your packaging team by
instructing them that it is simply unacceptable to have these packages
with such useless descriptions.

The fact that they all seem to be trimming off the FIX_ME that npm2deb
includes for them, and are thus also removing the explanation of what
Node.js is, seems like vandalism to me.  Did you tell them to do that,
or are they learning that from one another?

TBH I find this whole approach rather worrying.

  Are you paying these people for their efforts?

  Are we supposed to expect them to remain interested in these packages
  when the money dries up?

  If not, what is the plan for providing maintenance for these packages
  for the time that they are going to be in stable?

Cheers, Phil.

P.S. While you're at it, I would suggest that you encourage your
packaging team to contact the upstreams in order to discover whether
they are happy for their current release to be preserved in Debian
stable -- I can imagine that some of them might be unhappy with the
prospect of having the latest release packaged, if there are bug fixes
in the HEAD that they don't want bug reports about for the next 5 years.
They could then push out a release quickly and you could package that
instead.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: Worthless descriptions for almost all of the recent node-* ITPs (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)

2017-01-05 Thread Philip Hands 
Christian Seiler  writes:

> On 01/05/2017 02:06 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Quoting Riku Voipio (2017-01-05 12:53:16)
>>> Vast majority of users would only install this via dependencies. It's 
>>> hardly a node-specific problem that debian package searches output 
>>> large amount of packages that are not useful unless you happen to be a 
>>> programmer.
>> 
>> ...and I agree that the issue is not specific to node-* packages, but I 
>> find it is quite common there.  Quite likely due to recent inclusion of 
>> lots of packages, prepared semi-automated - as Philip pointed out very 
>> well.
>
> Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default?

I think you are perhaps misinterpreting my original subject line as
saying that the node packages themselves are somehow not of interest.

Sorry for not making that clearer in the original subject, perhaps the
new one is better?

I was only referring to the quality of the descriptions -- I don't know
enough about node.js to comment on the merit of the packages themselves,
nor their likelihood of being of interest to people.

The example I picked out was laughably useless, but most of them are
packed with field-specific jargon in the short description, and lack a
long description.

We (as a group) appear to be learning to treat "node-*" as a flag
indicating that one does not need to pay attention.  That would seem to
be the reason that these ITPs mostly go without comment, and thus the
package gets uploaded with the same flaws.

I encourage people to take a closer look, and to comment on what they
find -- I've only scratched the surface, and have had a pretty good
hit-rate finding things (in addition to the missing descriptions) that
are worth commenting on.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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