Re: "Your branch is up-to-date ..." is incorrect English grammar

From: STEVEN WHITE <stevencharleswhitevoices@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 23, 2017, 03:55 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJXxHvVSXkQ4SYA5=ZtnWZCBbVk51oWY1OqM_XbGNoruyAGBrA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqmv6s5yzn.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Thank you, Martin and Junio. I'd be happy to review any patches. Thank you both for your help! :)

(incidentally, I've had a devil of a time sending my two emails on this topic--a total of 5 bounced mails for various reasons: didn't like my email format, didn't like my email address, mail client, I've had 2 syntax errors! I've only had success by sending via Gmail, plain-text, in a browser; and God only knows whether I'm wasting my time typing this. I'm not used to this world, so the bar is sufficiently high and irritating that I'm very disinclined to dip my toe into these waters again, which is a shame).

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 3:37 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 26 quoted lines

> Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> But “your branch is up-to-date” is INCORRECT. And, because it’s
>>> incorrect, it conveys an odd and unsettling experience to native
>>> English speakers whenever they read it.
>>>
>>> If you’re curious, you can find plenty of discussion of this point of
>>> grammar. Here’s just one example:
>>> https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180611/do-i-keep-myself-up-to-date-or-up-to-date-on-something.
>>
>> There is also some previous discussion on this very list:
>> https://public-inbox.org/git/CALFtnmeRxgetuCVbO8ZmVkCR302vQ2s4hTPoHxAe5NEfmjtXEg@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
>>
>> The code base contains a few instances of "up-to-date" and "up to date".
>> A tree wide sweep could be made to update user-visible strings in the
>> code and in the documentation. Fixing source code comments seems like
>> overkill.
>
> It should be safe to update any message that is meant for human
> consumption (i.e. those inside the _("... message ...")) i18n
> marker).  As the use of "up-to-date" dates back to the days when
> Linus was still doing much code for our project, I suspect there may
> be some plumbing message that contains the phrase that scripts
> expect to stay spelled that way, and it is not OK to "fix" them.
>
> Thanks.