Re: [PATCH v2] Provide some linguistic guidance for the documentation.

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 2, 2013, 06:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20130802062511.GA3013@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <7vfvuts25p.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 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