[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#974068: Bug#974068: aho-corasick: useless description, no man page, no --help output

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

Quoting Sylvestre Ledru (2020-11-09 16:27:45)
> aho-corasick is a library used by ripgrep ( https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rust-ripgrep ). Which is indeed a grep replacement
> 
> Its description is generated from the metadata we get from the package 
> system.
> 
> > I installed it and found:
> >
> > $ man aho-corasick-dot
> > No manual entry for aho-corasick-dot
> > See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.
> >
> > When I run "aho-corasick-dot --help" I get something that looks like a
> > graphviz dot graph.
> >
> > What is this tool doing?
> It is generated by our tooling. We could remove it, I don't think it is 
> indeed usefull.

policy §3.4 says: "The description should describe the package (the program) to
a user (system administrator) who has never met it before so that they have
enough information to decide whether they want to install it."

If you don't think it's useful, you might remove it. Otherwise, I think it
should have a description complying with §3.4.

> > Also, when I use codesearch:
> >
> > https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=This+package+contains+the+following+binaries+built+from+the+Rust+crate&literal=1
> >
> > Then there are a lot of packages which just say "This package contains
> > the following binaries built from the Rust crate" in their long
> > description. How is this useful?
> 
> Not sure how this is related?!

It seems that there are many packages with this autogenerated description and
that aho-corasick is just one of many. Does this make sense to the rust
maintainers to auto-generate long descriptions that do not add much of what is
the intended value of the description field?

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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