[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#650171: package description

[Justin B Rye]

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Dear Chromium Maintainers,
> thank you for maintaining Chromium.
> 
> I don't like the following (upstream) boilerplate, because I consider it to be
> marketing speech as it seems to me grammatically incorrect.

There's certainly a bit of tactical weaselry, but I see no grammar
problem.
 
>   Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer,
>   faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web.
> 
> This sentence implies a comparison (safer, faster), but it does not say what
> has been compared.

Well, in advertising we're usually expected to read it as "better than
the competition", though if they were challenged they could claim it
was only "better than previous versions of the same product".  Note
that this is only what the project *aims* to do - a phrasing that
relieves the maintainers of any responsibility for checking that these
aims are being achieved.  Fortunately they pretty much are, which
makes it inoffensive as marketing blurbs go.

> Somewhere I read a post asking whether it is noteworthy in
> Debian package descriptions to stress that a software is open source. Open
> source is different from Free Software.

Putting it in the first paragraph and then stressing that there's a
related fork called Google Chrome is either pointless or (readers are
entitled to infer) a hint that the difference is a matter of freeness.
 
> Please consider
> 
>   The Chromium project aims to build a safe, fast, and stable browser for all
>   Internet users.

The project's eventual aim is in fact to build something that's less a
traditional browser and more a "tabbed window manager, or shell for
the web".  If we want to talk about the current reality instead then
we need to leave out the mention of aims and say something like:

    The Chromium project is developing a safe, fast, and stable web browser.

And that's so flat I'd rather have some marketing-speak.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package