readme.gentoo_create_doc() currently does: echo -e ${DOC_CONTENTS} | fmt > "${T}"/README.gentoo According to fmt.info: `fmt' prefers breaking lines at the end of a sentence, and tries to avoid line breaks after the first word of a sentence or before the last word of a sentence. A "sentence break" is defined as either the end of a paragraph or a word ending in any of `.?!', followed by two spaces or end of line, ignoring any intervening parentheses or quotes. However, since there are no quotes around ${DOC_CONTENTS}, any two spaces or newline characters are changed into a single space, which means that fmt will not recognise any sentence endings. (In fact, it will never break a line after a full stop followed by a single space.)
All this quoting is a hell for me :( If I use "" fmt does nothing and exact content of DOC_CONTENTS is used, do you have any ideas for having DOC_CONTENTS content formatted by fmt even using quotes? :/
The problem is that fmt doesn't join successive lines with different indentation. I believe that it would work if the indentation of each line is removed, like this: echo -e "${DOC_CONTENTS}" | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | fmt > "${T}"/README.gentoo But maybe it is overkill. A simple fold should also do the job (and doesn't care about sentence ends): echo -e ${DOC_CONTENTS} | fold -s -w 70 > "${T}"/README.gentoo
Thanks, will try tomorrow, I am a bit tired (and also a bit angry due discussion on IRC :S)
I am now building all packages using eclass to verify nothing breaks, only a question, what is preferred maximum line width? fmt was defaulting to 75, fold defaults to 80 but you force it to be 70 Thanks for the info
According to readability studies, a line length around 70 characters is the optimum for human readable text. The exact value varies, for example the old netiquette guidelines say "limit line length to fewer than 65 characters": http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt Defaults of text editors for line wrapping are 70 chars for Emacs, and 72 chars for Vim and Nano. GLEP 42 (news items) also says 72. So make it 70 or 72 please. 80 is definitely too long.
+ 03 Mar 2013; Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org> readme.gentoo.eclass: + Change formatting tool as discussed with Ulrich Müller in bug #460050, + thanks a lot to him for his help. +
Hm, I just see that fold outputs trailing whitespace. Would you mind if I add this: | sed "s/[[:space:]]*$//" into the pipeline, after fold?
(In reply to comment #7) > Hm, I just see that fold outputs trailing whitespace. Would you mind if I > add this: > | sed "s/[[:space:]]*$//" > into the pipeline, after fold? I have no problem... if you could rebuild packages inheritting readme.gentoo.eclass to check it doesn't break anything, would be better :)
