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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 1, 2013, 18:21 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfvuts25p.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1375369825-28636-1-git-send-email-marcnarc@xiplink.com>

Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> + 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).