The documentation says: === DESCRIPTION A short (less than 80 characters) description of the package's purpose. Mandatory. === This can be read as 79 CHAR plus two CHAR for " marks, or including the ". It would be interesting to give a reason for this limit. Of course there must be a limit, but why not 40 CHAR or 255 CHAR? A reason would motivate developers to accept the limit and help to find conflicts, if the limit must be changed some day. Today there are 2398 ebuilds in the tree ignoring the limit. [1] [1] counted with: qgrep -C -N DESCRIPTION= | sed -e "s/DESCRIPTION=//g" | awk '{split($0,a,":"); if (length(a[2])>81) print a[1] " --> " a[2]}' | wc -l Reproducible: Always
80 char limits the description message string. The limiting string quotes are not relevant for the message length. This is probably a historical result of the standard limit for code with. See: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/148677/why-is-80-characters-the-standard-limit-for-code-width
Can we fix the wording please? As I understand it, "less than 80 characters" is grammatically incorrect, see bug 562808 comment 8. The old devrel handbook said "A _short_, one line description of your package." https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/handbook/hb-guide-ebuild.xml?hideattic=0&revision=1.48&view=markup#l517 So I believe the intention is that the description should fit into one line of standard length, i.e. 80 characters or fewer. Suggested wording: "A short (not more than 80 characters) description of the package's purpose." I don't attach a patch because it would be trivial. Unless there are objections, I'll commit the change in a few days from now.
(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #2) > So I believe the intention is that the description should fit into one line > of standard length, i.e. 80 characters or fewer. > > Suggested wording: > "A short (not more than 80 characters) description of the package's purpose." That seems to be mixing up (a) the length of the whole line and (b) the length of the description itself. # echo $((80 - $(echo -n 'DESCRIPTION=""' | wc -c))) 66 So maybe pick from "A short (not more than 66 characters) description of the package's purpose." and "A short (line should not exceed 80 characters) description of the package's purpose."
(In reply to Sebastian Pipping from comment #3) > > "A short (not more than 80 characters) description of the package's > > purpose." > > That seems to be mixing up (a) the length of the whole line and (b) the > length of the description itself. No mixing up here. The limit we are discussing is defined in the "Variables" section, so obviously it is about (b) the length of the description itself. Line length in ebuilds (a) is mentioned somewhere else: https://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/file-format/index.html#indenting-and-whitespace There it says "Where possible, try to keep lines no wider than 80 positions." which is less strict. (Besides, even if there was a strict limit for line length, assigning an 80 char string to DESCRIPTION could still be done using only lines with fewer than 80 characters.)
(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #2) > "A short (not more than 80 characters) description of the package's purpose." Pushed.
