Bug#720760: gmusicbrowser: Minor typo in description

[Justin B Rye]

Package: gmusicbrowser
Version: 1.1.9-2
Followup-For: Bug #720760

Keita Maehara <maehara at debian.org> wrote:
>|  gmusicbrower is a powerful graphic browser which supports libraries with
>             ^missing 's'
	            
It would be a pity to fix that and miss the various other problems
with this package description.  Here's a full review:

> Package: gmusicbrowser
[...]
> Description: graphic jukebox for large collections of mp3/ogg/flac/mpc files

First problem: "graphic" as an adjective means "vividly pictorial" (as
in "graphic scenes of carnage").  The word you want is "graphical".

Second problem: the canonical names for those file formats aren't
all-lowercase (it should be "MP3/Ogg/FLAC/MPC files").  But I don't
see any evidence that this software offers any special support for MPC
that it doesn't also offer for WAV or anything else supported by
GStreamer.

And anyway, if the idea is that this means "all well-established music
formats", it's a bad idea to hard-code the list so that it needs
regular updates - just say "music files".  Or come to that, instead of
"collections of music files" I'll make it just "music collections".

>  gmusicbrower is a powerful graphic browser which supports libraries with
>  a great number of songs (>10,000)

Again s/graphic/graphical/.  Usually I would say that "graphical
browser" runs the risk of being misinterpreted as "X11 $BROWSER" (i.e.
web browser), but I suppose the package's name already disambiguates
that.

"A great number of" is subtly unidiomatic.  10,000 isn't "great", it's
just "large"; ℯ is a "great" number!

Using mathematical notation within running text is deprecated; just
say "over 10,000".

Missing sentence-final punctuation.

>  .
>  It can use multiple inputs and plays MP3, OGG and flac files; it also supports
>  mass-renaming and mass-retagging of a song library, multiple genres per song,
>  ratings and customizable labels

What does "it can use multiple inputs" mean?  I don't see any
equivalent claim on the upstream website or in the documentation.
Does it mean it can play two files simultaneously?  I'll leave it
untouched, but I suspect it should be cut.

Next, some more random capitalisation.  "MP3" is right, but it's "Ogg"
and "FLAC".  Saying here that it plays just those three formats is
bizarre, since it implies that contrary to the claims in the synopsis
gmusicbrowser doesn't play MPC files.  Shouldn't it be something more
like "it has native support for..."?

The rest of the paragraph is okay, though while I'm here I'll impose
the standard debian-l10n-english "house style", which uses "Harvard
comma"; here that means adding commas after "Ogg" and "ratings".  I
would also promote the semicolon to a stop and add sentence-final
punctuation again.

>  .
>  The window layout is also customizable and it ships natively plugins to use
>  last.fm, retrieve lyrics, find album pictures and WebContext which, through
>  the mozilla/webkit engine will display the wikipedia artist's page and search
>  lyrics with google.

The first clause here, where the subject is the "layout", gets the
paragraph off to a misleading start, since the next clause requires
readers to guess that the subject has changed to "gmusicbrowser".
Things would work better if you said "gmusicbrowser has a customizable
window layout, and..."

Then, "ships natively plugins" is ungrammatical.  But saying that
gmusicbrowser "ships" plugins is seeing it from an inappropriate
upstream-developer perspective anyway.  Users don't want to run
/usr/bin/gmusicbrowser to ship plugins - what you mean is that the
Debian package "contains" or just "comes with" plugins.

The whole clause about WebContext has some more leaky syntactic
plumbing, starting with an unintelligible "which".  Do I correctly
understand that album pictures and WebContext are two different things
that it can use plugins to find?  Part of the problem here is that
you're being inconsistent in your use of commas within lists, which is
why I'm standardising on Harvard comma.  Other problems with this part
include:
 * "through" would be clearer as "using";
 * "Mozilla/WebKit" should have their canonical capitalisations;
 * likewise "Last.fm", "Wikipedia", and "Google";
 * it's unclear what the subject of "will display" is;
 * "the Wikipedia artist's page" is the wrong word-order;
 * "search" is intransitive; you have to search "for" the lyrics.
All of this is complicated enough that I would recommend fencing it
off between parentheses.

My revised version (patch attached):

| Description: graphical jukebox for large music collections
|  gmusicbrowser is a powerful graphical browser which supports libraries
|  with a very large number of songs (over 10,000).
|  .
|  It can use multiple inputs and has native support for MP3, Ogg, and
|  FLAC files. It also supports mass-renaming and mass-retagging of a song
|  library, multiple genres per song, ratings, and customizable labels.
|  .
|  gmusicbrowser has a customizable window layout, and comes with plugins
|  to use Last.fm, retrieve lyrics, or find album pictures and WebContext
|  (using the Mozilla or WebKit engines to display the artist's page on
|  Wikipedia and search for lyrics with Google).

-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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