"up-to-date" vs. "up to date"

Jeffrey Manian· Apr 13, 2017, 20:34 UTC · lore

Hello git community,

This is about an issue of language style and punctuation, not anything functional. Apologies in advance if I've brought this to the wrong place.

There are a bunch of situations in which git will print a message like "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'" or "Already up-to-date."

In many of these cases, including the two examples I just gave, "up to date" should not be hyphenated --- at least according to most (if not all) English-language style guides.

Here are a couple posts in support of that, which also explain when it should and should not be hyphenated: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180611/do-i-keep-myself-up-to-date-or-up-to-date-on-something http://grammarist.com/usage/up-to-date/

And the Chromium community dealing with the same issue: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-reviews/edodON6G2oY

I thought about submitting a patch, but I started looking through the source code and found that "up-to-date" appears 61 times. So before I get into that I thought I would check with the community to see if this is something that's already been debated and decided.

Awaiting your thoughts, Jeff Manian

brian m. carlson· Apr 15, 2017, 04:34 UTC · re: Jeffrey Manian · lore

Re: "up-to-date" vs. "up to date"

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 04:34:16PM -0400, Jeffrey Manian wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Hello git community,
> 
> This is about an issue of language style and punctuation, not anything
> functional. Apologies in advance if I've brought this to the wrong
> place.
> 
> There are a bunch of situations in which git will print a message like
> "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'" or "Already
> up-to-date."
> 
> In many of these cases, including the two examples I just gave, "up to
> date" should not be hyphenated --- at least according to most (if not
> all) English-language style guides.

Yes, the Chicago Manual of Style agrees that "[i]f the phrasal adjective follows a verb, it is usually unhyphenated." I often keep this rule in mind when writing commit messages.

Show 12 quoted lines

> Here are a couple posts in support of that, which also explain when it
> should and should not be hyphenated:
> https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180611/do-i-keep-myself-up-to-date-or-up-to-date-on-something
> http://grammarist.com/usage/up-to-date/
> 
> And the Chromium community dealing with the same issue:
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-reviews/edodON6G2oY
> 
> I thought about submitting a patch, but I started looking through the
> source code and found that "up-to-date" appears 61 times. So before I
> get into that I thought I would check with the community to see if
> this is something that's already been debated and decided.

To my knowledge, we haven't discussed this issue before. I'm not Junio, so I can't speak for whether a patch would ultimately be accepted, but I'm not opposed to seeing or reviewing such a patch.

Generally, the rule on the list is that unless the change is very large or wide ranging, you'll find people are more likely to give you feedback on a concrete patch (including whether the idea is desirable) than on an idea in general.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
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