In line with the Nixpkgs manual.
A mechanical change, done with this command:
find pkgs -name "*.nix" | \
while read f; do \
sed -e 's/description\s*=\s*"\([a-z]\)/description = "\u\1/' -i "$f"; \
done
I manually skipped some:
* Descriptions starting with an abbreviation, a user name or package name
* Frequently generated expressions (haskell-packages.nix)
a program for converting UIF files (Universal Image Format, used by MagicISO)
to uncompressed images depending on the input file type:
ISO, BIN/CUE, MDS/MDF, CCD/IMG/SUB and NRG.
This will probably be mandatory soon, and is a step in the right
direction. Removes the deprecated meta.version, and move some meta
sections to the end of the file where I should have put them in
the first place.
If you have services.gnome3.enabled = true, you shouldn't need this, but
if you don't, you'll need this dconf env var to be able to save settings
in these apps.
(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.