[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#682802: Package description issues

[Justin B Rye]

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Dear Debian Med Packaging Team,
> 
> I believe that the package description (1) is not what you intended. There
> is an extra space at the beginning of the fifth line of the long description
> that breaks the formatting (2). And I'm afraid there is a missing word in
> the last sentence of the long description.
> 
> 
>    Description: Package for visualizing data and information

Also, DevRef says you don't need to capitalise the first word; and
this synopsis has a low high data-to-ink ratio - I already knew the
package was a package, and I'd be very surprised if it could visualise
data but not information.

>     Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos
>     ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions.
>     Circos is ideal for creating publication-quality infographics
>     and illustrations with a high data-to-ink ratio, richly layered
>      data and pleasant symmetries. You have fine control each element
>     in the figure to tailor its focus points and detail to your audience.

[...]
> Description: package for visualizing data and information
>  Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — ideal for exploring
>  relationships between objects or positions and creating
>  publication-quality graphs with densely packeged information. You
                                                ^^
>  have fine control over each element in the figure to tailor its
>  focus points and detail to your audience.

Better, but it could still afford to spend less effort on soaping me
up and more on explaining roughly what sort of thing it is.  My first
assumption was that it was a graphical app, but the homepage says it's
scriptable, with "no interactive user interface", and compares it to
gnuplot.  I suggest we put the word "plotter" right in the synopsis.
 
> Description: package for visualizing data and information - standard fonts
>  Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos
>  ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions.
>  Circos is ideal for creating publication-quality infographics
>  and illustrations with a high data-to-ink ratio, richly layered
>   data and pleasant symmetries. You have fine control each element
>  in the figure to tailor its focus points and detail to your audience.

Wrong version!

>  .
>  This package contains a set of fonts used by default with Circos.

I would suggest:
 
 Package: circos
 [...]
 Description: plotter for visualizing data
  Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — ideal for exploring
  relationships between objects or positions, and creating highly
  informative publication-quality graphics.
  .
  This package provides the Circos plotting engine, which is command-line
  driven (like gnuplot) and fully scriptable.
 
 Package: otf-symbols-circos
 [...]
 Description: plotter for visualizing data - standard fonts
  Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — ideal for exploring
  relationships between objects or positions, and creating highly
  informative publication-quality graphics.
  .
  This package provides a set of fonts used by default with Circos.

> Perhaps somebody would like to comment on (4) as well?

Okay... circos-tools is in a separate source package, but has the same
boilerplate as the above, and a description that essentially just
lists the names of the tools in the set.  I'd suggest:

 Package: circos-tools
 [...]
 Description: plotter for visualizing data - helper utilities
  Circos visualizes data in a circular layout — ideal for exploring
  relationships between objects or positions, and creating highly
  informative publication-quality graphics.
  .
  This package provides a set of tools to help process your data:
  binlinks, bundlelinks, categoryviewer, colorinterpolate,
  filterlinks, maketutorialimages, orderchr, randomlinks, resample,
  and tableviewer.

(I was going to turn that into a bulleted list in the format
   * binaryname - manpage-style synopsis
but some of them are just too hard to find documentation for...)
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package