(My OCD kicked in today...)
Remove repeated package names, capitalize first word, remove trailing
periods and move overlong descriptions to longDescription.
I also simplified some descriptions as well, when they were particularly
long or technical, often based on Arch Linux' package descriptions.
I've tried to stay away from generated expressions (and I think I
succeeded).
Some specifics worth mentioning:
* cron, has "Vixie Cron" in its description. The "Vixie" part is not
mentioned anywhere else. I kept it in a parenthesis at the end of the
description.
* ctags description started with "Exuberant Ctags ...", and the
"exuberant" part is not mentioned elsewhere. Kept it in a parenthesis
at the end of description.
* nix has the description "The Nix Deployment System". Since that
doesn't really say much what it is/does (especially after removing
the package name!), I changed that to "Powerful package manager that
makes package management reliable and reproducible" (borrowed from
nixos.org).
* Tons of "GNU Foo, Foo is a [the important bits]" descriptions
is changed to just [the important bits]. If the package name doesn't
contain GNU I don't think it's needed to say it in the description
either.
These packages come with R, but if we install them as part of this build, then
we cannot update them without re-building R as well. Instead, we add those
packages to the R environment through the r-wrapper. This means that
recommended packages can be updated in cran-packgaes.nix, and those updates
have an effect on the installation without re-building R itself.
* Remove package name
* Start with upper case letter
* Remove trailing period
Also reword some descriptions and move some long descriptions to
longDescription.
I'm not touching generated packages.
There are many more packages to fix, this is just a start.
Rules:
* Don't repeat the package name (not always that easy...)
* Start with capital letter
* Don't end with full stop
* Don't start with "The ..." or "A ..."
I've also added descriptions to some packages and rewritten others.
![](/avatar/2f93d08a773b27d6548598c5f45aa3a9?size=56 "Jason \\"Don\\" O'Conal"){kind=small}