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

[kpcyrd]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 07:36:25PM +0100, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> > 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.

librust-*-dev packages aren't meant to be consumed by users, so I'm not
sure the policy applies. There are people working on a proposal to
exclude librust-* from the "regular" repos, which is currently necessary
due to technical limitations in debian. Whether or not aho-corasick
should exist instead of just librust-aho-corasick-dev is a valid
question of course.

> > > 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?

We generally welcome new volunteers in #debian-rust, although most of
the volunteer time is eaten by maintaining the version constraints of
our 800 packages. :(