[Pkg-libburnia-devel] Bug#993646: xorriso-dd-target: unclear in long description if general-purpose

Jonas Smedegaard dr at jones.dk
Sat Sep 4 09:55:01 BST 2021


Hi Thomas,

Quoting Thomas Schmitt (2021-09-04 10:28:43)
> it is usable as a standalone tool, which shall make safer the 
> procedure of copying a Debian ISO image onto a USB stick. As a shell 
> script it is hopefully widely usable on all GNU/Linux systems which 
> offer lsblk(8).

Cool: I have missed such a tool for long!


> Nevertheless, it already has one customer which uses it as component:
>   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/xscl
> 
> I have difficulties to find a short statement which addresses your 
> question in that light. I could simply state:
> 
>   This is a standalone tool but also usable as part of other tools 
>   which aim for safer copying of disk images.

How about rephrasing the current initial sentence:

  xorriso-dd-target evaluates block devices [...] and optionally copies 
  the image [...]

to this:

  xorriso-dd-target is a command-line tool to evaluate block devices 
  [...] and optionally copy the image [...]


> (Actually i don't see why a reader would suspect that it is not 
> standalone. Wouldn't this suspicion apply to the xorriso binary, too 
> ?)

The package xorriso has this initial paragraph:

  xorriso is a command line and dialog application, which creates, 
  loads, manipulates, and writes ISO-9660 file system images with Rock 
  Ridge extensions.

To me, that text unambiguously states that it is a general-purpose tool.


> Is it permissible to add a link to
>   https://wiki.debian.org/XorrisoDdTarget
> instead ?

Not instead - package long description should be self-contained.

But I notice that the package has http://libburnia-project.org as 
homepage and that page seemingly doesn't mention the tool.  So perhaps 
it makes sense to treat https://wiki.debian.org/XorrisoDdTarget as the 
homepage of the tool?  Or arguably better (since it seems you are 
upstream author), add a page e.g. 
http://libburnia-project.org/XorrisoDdTarget and have the package point 
to that page.


Kind regards, and thanks for the quick response,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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