Re: [oe-commits] Scott Garman : Add missing SUMMARY fields to various recipes

[Mark Hatle <mark.hatle@windriver.com>]

On 12/19/11 3:54 AM, Andreas Müller wrote:
>> diff --git a/meta/recipes-support/libevent/libevent_1.4.14b.bb
>> b/meta/recipes-support/libevent/libevent_1.4.14b.bb index 1a369b5..36468dc
>> 100644
>> --- a/meta/recipes-support/libevent/libevent_1.4.14b.bb
>> +++ b/meta/recipes-support/libevent/libevent_1.4.14b.bb
>> @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
>> -DESCRIPTION = "an asynchronous event notification library"
>> +SUMMARY = "An asynchronous event notification library"
>> +DESCRIPTION = "An asynchronous event notification library"
>>   HOMEPAGE = "http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/"
>>   SECTION = "libs"
>>
> What is the value in creating redundancies by copying DESRCIPTION to SUMMARY?

(related item, not the actual answer to your existion)

For those unfamiliar with the SUMMARY, it automatically inherits the 
DESCRIPTION.  In the original design of the SUMMARY field it was expected that a 
number of items already have "small" descriptions, so automatically inheriting 
made sense.

When I did the original pass for oe-core to add summaries, what I found is that 
many of the "DESCRIPTIONS" are really just summaries.  So (in the example 
above), I would have renamed the DESCRIPTION to summary, and put in a new, more 
detailed DESCRIPTION.

For instance (taking from Fedora):

DESCRIPTION = "The libevent API provides a mechanism to execute \
a callback function when a specific event occurs on a file \
descriptor or after a timeout has been reached. libevent is \
meant to replace the asynchronous event loop found in event \
driven network servers. An application just needs to call \
event_dispatch() and can then add or remove events dynamically \
without having to change the event loop."

So my suggestion is when the DESCRIPTION is small enough, there is no reason to 
add a duplicate SUMMARY.  However, it should be a trigger that the DESCRIPTION 
itself is likely just a summary, and a more explicit DESCRIPTION should be 
added.  (I always thing of a summary as "what is this in 74 charachters or 
less", and the DESCRIPTION is "why would I want this thing?")

--Mark

> Andreas
>
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