Re: first help sentence truncated

[Colin Macdonald]

On 2018-08-30 01:13 PM, Rik wrote:
> The abbreviation "vs." still looks like a sentence end because the next 
> letter following the period is capitalized.  At this point, I think it 
> would be easier to rewrite the help text and expand "vs." to "versus".

Perhaps generate_html could just write out what it thinks the first 
sentence is as a debug message.  That way we punt strange cases back to 
the package maintainer.

But I think the best approach is two have *both* bits of text (the 
one-liner and the longer paragraph) as separate data, so the package 
author can decide what to put in each field.  Add a "Summary: <one 
sentence>" field to the DESCRIPTION file.  If the new field is missing, 
we take the first sentence, as we do now.

This also aligns nicely with the <summary> and <description> tags from 
the foo.metainfo.xml file.  E.g., form octave-image.metainfo.xml:

  <summary>Image processing, feature extraction, transformations, 
morphological operations, filters, and more</summary>
  <description>
    <p>Provides functions for processing images, such as feature
    extraction, image statistics, spatial and geometric
    transformations, morphological operations, linear filtering, and
    much more.</p>
  </description>

(so in principle a Makefile could generate one from the other.)

cheers,
Colin