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Herbert Valerio Riedel authored
It seems that package authors are often unaware of the purpose of synopsis/description fields, and their impact on cabal and Hackage. A common mistake is to write a verbose synopsis and leave the description field empty or even worse with useless boilerplate-text filled in by tooling, resulting in a suboptimal presentation on Hackage. The `synopsis` is supposed to be a terse <80 char description. In fact, the cabal user's guide states: > A very short description of the package, for use in a table of > packages. This is your headline, so keep it short (one line) but as > informative as possible. Save space by not including the package name > or saying it’s written in Haskell. On Hackage this synopsis is printed in the `<title>` and at the top of the package page, and is difficult to spot. However, the synopsis is displayed on Hackage in package lists or search results. On the other hand, the `description` field is rather important for `cabal info` as well as the package cover-page, as it's printed below the "The $PKGNAME package"-heading, and above the properties section, and that's where everyone looks at. This new lint check is an attempt to point out a suspiciously short description field by using the heuristic of expecting the description field to be longer than the synopsis.
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