It has been found that our pkgdesc entries are messy in format and some of them do not provide effective information or are too redundant. This documentation serves as a guideline for clear, informative, and precise pkgdescs.
The description should be a full sentence starting with an UPPERCASE letter, but with NO trailing periods.
stacking wayland compositor with look and feel from openbox.
Stacking wayland compositor with look and feel from openbox
since pkgdesc appears in places where trailing periods look redundant or unnatural, for example,
$ pacman -Si ctags
Repository : main
Name : ctags
Version : 6.1.20250511.0-2
Description : A maintained ctags implementation.
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://github.com/universal-c1tags/ctags
Licenses : GPL-2.0-or-later
Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : libseccomp jansson libyaml libxml2
Optional Deps : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Download Size : 740.26 KiB
Installed Size : 1973.02 KiB
Packager : eweos-x8664-worker1
<[email protected]>
Build Date : Mon May 19 03:24:37 2025
Validated By : MD5 Sum SHA-256 Sum Signature
where the description becomes the only item that comes with trailing punctuaction.
Descriptions are expected to provide a brief overview of a package, so that most people can understand the purpose of it from the description with little prior knowledge.
Buildtool package set
Basic, default toolset for building eweOS packages
A pkgdesc should not be an advertisement for the project.
Therefore, try not to use biased phrases which could make it less objective. Take an example for zstd:
Extremely fast, efficient and robust compression algorithm
Fast real-time compression algorithm
while the word extremely contains strong emotion, efficient and robust draw positive opinion on it, they are not ideal options.
It used to be an RFC which could be found at this GitHub issue.
During drafting, the AOSC packaging style is taken as a reference.