Re: [PATCH] gnu packages: Clean up synopses and descriptions.

[Mathieu Lirzin]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> What are your concerns and what would you prefer?  (I was left with the
> impression that there was a rough consensus in the other thread, but
> surely there’s a bias.)
>
> In Emacs it’s quite easily typed (C-x 8 RET etc.), and at worst people
> can copy/paste it.

My concerns are about the translators, who will have to care about more
formatting (formatted variables are enough :)) and about my impression
that keeping unformatted text can be more easily rendered in different
contexts (guix package, guix web, guix.el and beyond!) but maybe I'm
wrong.

The first (probably stupid) idea that comes to my mind is to transform
the description field into a list of multiple (unformatted) strings and
sexps, where the responsability of the formatting is delegated to the
program that actually displays the descriptions.  For the translator,
the description will appear as 4 independent strings with no special
formatting to take care.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
       (description
        "XKBUtils is a collection of small utilities for X Keyboard (XKB)
 extension to the X11 protocol.  It includes:"
        '(unordered-list        ; Or a better symbol
          "xkbbell: generate XKB bell events;"
          "xkbvleds: display the state of LEDs on an XKB keyboard in a window;"
          "xkbwatch: reports changes in the XKB keyboard state."))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

or with just nested lists

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
       (description
        "XKBUtils is a collection of small utilities for X Keyboard (XKB)
 extension to the X11 protocol.  It includes:"
        '("xkbbell: generate XKB bell events;"
          "xkbvleds: display the state of LEDs on an XKB keyboard in a window;"
          "xkbwatch: reports changes in the XKB keyboard state."))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---


I let more experienced schemers interpret this idea ;).

--
Mathieu Lirzin