Re: [PATCH v2] Provide some linguistic guidance for the documentation.
On 13-08-02 02:25 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote: Junio C Hamano wrote: Is that accurate? My impression has been: The documentation liberally mixes US and UK English (en_US/UK) norms for spelling and grammar, which is somewhat unfortunate. In an ideal world, it would have been better if it consistently used only one and not the other, and we would have picked en_US. I'm not convinced that would be better, even in an ideal world. It's certainly useful to have a consistent spelling of each term to make searching with "grep" easier. But searches with "grep" do not work well with line breaks anyway, and search engines for larger collections of documents seem to know about the usual spelling variants (along with knowing about stemming, etc). Unless we are planning to provide a separate en_GB translation, it seems unfortunate to consistently have everything spelled in the natural way for one group of people and in an unnatural way for another, just in the name of having a convention. Personally I find it distracting when the norms are mixed. I don't think the current mishmash pleases anyone (as evidenced by the steady stream of patches that change spellings). I am not sure it makes sense for the documentation to say "A huge disruptive patch of such-and-such specific kind of no immediate benefit is unwelcome". Isn't there some more general principle that implies that? Or the CodingGuidelines could simply say The documentation uses a mixture of U.S. and British English. I'm hoping this patch will help the list avoid seeing patches that merely flip between alternate spellings. (Perhaps the commit message should state this?) I think it's important to be clear about the kind of work the git community wants to see. So I don't think that single sentence by itself would be helpful. In the case of alternate spellings in the documentation, I think there's a temptation to create a blanket patch that "fixes" lots of perceived misspellings since such changes are mere typographic tweaks. It's a bit easy to overlook the disruptive nature of such a patch, so IMO it bears repeating here. Are you suggesting maybe that there should be no "official" dialect? That the guidance should simply say that we don't want to see patches that merely flip between alternate spellings (because we don't really care)? M. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: [PATCH v2] Provide some linguistic guidance for the documentation.
Junio C Hamano wrote: > Is that accurate? My impression has been: > > The documentation liberally mixes US and UK English (en_US/UK) > norms for spelling and grammar, which is somewhat unfortunate. > In an ideal world, it would have been better if it consistently > used only one and not the other, and we would have picked en_US. I'm not convinced that would be better, even in an ideal world. It's certainly useful to have a consistent spelling of each term to make searching with "grep" easier. But searches with "grep" do not work well with line breaks anyway, and search engines for larger collections of documents seem to know about the usual spelling variants (along with knowing about stemming, etc). Unless we are planning to provide a separate en_GB translation, it seems unfortunate to consistently have everything spelled in the natural way for one group of people and in an unnatural way for another, just in the name of having a convention. I am not sure it makes sense for the documentation to say "A huge disruptive patch of such-and-such specific kind of no immediate benefit is unwelcome". Isn't there some more general principle that implies that? Or the CodingGuidelines could simply say The documentation uses a mixture of U.S. and British English. My two cents, Jonathan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: [PATCH v2] Provide some linguistic guidance for the documentation.
Marc Branchaud writes: > + The documentation generally follows US English (en_US) norms for spelling > + and grammar, although most spelling variations are tolerated. Just avoid > + mixing styles when updating existing text. If you wish to correct the > + English of some of the existing documentation, please see the documentation- > + related advice in the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file. Is that accurate? My impression has been: The documentation liberally mixes US and UK English (en_US/UK) norms for spelling and grammar, which is somewhat unfortunate. In an ideal world, it would have been better if it consistently used only one and not the other, and we would have picked en_US. A huge patch that touches the files all over the place only to correct the inconsistency is not welcome, though. Potential clashes with other changes that can result from such a patch is simply not worth it. What we would want is to gradually convert them, with small and easily digestable patches, as a side effect of doing some other _real_ work in the vicinity (e.g. rewriting a paragraph to clarify, while turning en_UK spelling to en_US). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: [PATCH v2] Provide some linguistic guidance for the documentation.
On 13-08-01 11:10 AM, Marc Branchaud wrote: > This will hopefully avoid questions over which spelling and grammar should > be used. Translators are of course free to create localizations for other Oops, I should have removed the word "other" here. M. > specific English dialects. > > Signed-off-by: Marc Branchaud -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
