> Starting with lintian v1.23.42 the spelling check also looks for the
> correct spelling of the above mentioned project names (requested at
> #456582). Because I made an archive wide lintian check (except for arch
> all packages) with the latest lintian version here are some lists of
> packages spelling some project names incorrectly.
For folks who think this is annoyingly picky, well, it sort of is, but I
decided to add the check to lintian anyway only for package descriptions
(and doc-base titles and abstracts). It doesn't try to check other files,
in part because it doesn't matter as much elsewhere and in part because
there are too many false positives from configuration file fragments and
similar things.
But descriptions have a fairly limited content and aren't that subject to
false positives, and they're also the main thing that users see for our
packages. I think it's worth being a little picky about spelling,
punctuation, wording, and so forth with package descriptions in order to
create a consistent impression as much as we can. Lintian can't help with
checking most of that, but it can at least check for common capitalization
and spelling errors.
Note that if you want to refer to a specific package, you can quote the
word to indicate that it's a literal value, although that should be a
fairly rare problem.
If you see false positives that Lintian can avoid, please feel free to
file bugs against Lintian so that we can tweak things.
This joins the capitalization checks that Lintian has been doing for a
while for language names. (And note that Lintian no longer applies the
language name capitalization check to other files such as changelog, since
there were too many false positives.)
> For example GNOME is being spelt in some packages as Gnome, or simply gnome,
> when its right spelling: GNOME. Other project names such as Debian, KDE and
> Linux aren't being correctly capitalised.
>
> Neil Williams has requested me on #456495 to seek a concensus on this
> subject, hence the reason of this message.
Note that this is something we enforce when reviewing packages'
descriptions in the Smith reviews for English (but that project is
awfully slow given the low resources we have and we're still currently
focused on packages with debconf templates, which were the first
target).
May I suggest adding some other project names which capitalization is
not always obvious. Others can probably add more of these, but at
least, coming to my mind right now:
Python
MySQL
PostgreSQL
01-08-2008, 06:07 AM
Yves-Alexis Perez
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
On lun, 2008-01-07 at 20:06 -0600, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> Some weeks ago I noticed that some package descriptions incorrectly
> spell
> some project names, mainly because of capitalisation.
> For example GNOME is being spelt in some packages as Gnome, or simply
> gnome,
> when its right spelling: GNOME. Other project names such as Debian,
> KDE and
> Linux aren't being correctly capitalised.
>
Could you add Xfce to the list? This is the correct spelling, not XFce
nor XFCE.
Thanks
--
Yves-Alexis
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01-08-2008, 06:53 AM
Russ Allbery
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> writes:
> Could you add Xfce to the list? This is the correct spelling, not XFce
> nor XFCE.
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01-08-2008, 06:54 AM
Russ Allbery
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> writes:
> May I suggest adding some other project names which capitalization is
> not always obvious. Others can probably add more of these, but at
> least, coming to my mind right now:
>
> Python
> MySQL
> PostgreSQL
Added to Lintian, along with the postgressql misspelling.
BTW, the way that the Lintian spell-checking works is that it looks for
errors rather than looking for each word in a dictionary. It has a table
of pairs of error and correct word. So if you notice any common
misspelled words that Lintian doesn't catch, please let debian-lint-maint
know and we'll add them to the table. That's how the table was built in
the first place, I believe.
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01-08-2008, 07:30 AM
Ralf Treinen
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 08:07:14AM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On lun, 2008-01-07 at 20:06 -0600, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> > Some weeks ago I noticed that some package descriptions incorrectly
> > spell
> > some project names, mainly because of capitalisation.
> > For example GNOME is being spelt in some packages as Gnome, or simply
> > gnome,
> > when its right spelling: GNOME. Other project names such as Debian,
> > KDE and
> > Linux aren't being correctly capitalised.
> >
> Could you add Xfce to the list? This is the correct spelling, not XFce
> nor XFCE.
And also OCaml, please? -Ralf.
01-08-2008, 07:32 AM
Stefano Zacchiroli
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 11:54:32PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> BTW, the way that the Lintian spell-checking works is that it looks for
> errors rather than looking for each word in a dictionary. It has a table
> of pairs of error and correct word. So if you notice any common
> misspelled words that Lintian doesn't catch, please let debian-lint-maint
> know and we'll add them to the table.
Regarding the Objective Caml language, whose acronym correct
capitalization is "OCaml", please add the following:
ocaml -> OCaml
OCAML -> OCaml
Many thanks!
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
zack@{upsilon.cc,cs.unibo.it,debian.org} -<%>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
(15:56:48) Zack: e la demo dema ? / All one has to do is hit the
(15:57:15) Bac: no, la demo scema / right keys at the right time
01-08-2008, 06:43 PM
Russ Allbery
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 11:54:32PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> BTW, the way that the Lintian spell-checking works is that it looks for
>> errors rather than looking for each word in a dictionary. It has a
>> table of pairs of error and correct word. So if you notice any common
>> misspelled words that Lintian doesn't catch, please let
>> debian-lint-maint know and we'll add them to the table.
> Regarding the Objective Caml language, whose acronym correct
> capitalization is "OCaml", please add the following:
> ocaml -> OCaml
> OCAML -> OCaml
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01-08-2008, 09:36 PM
Joey Hess
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
Raphael Geissert wrote:
> Some weeks ago I noticed that some package descriptions incorrectly spell
> some project names, mainly because of capitalisation.
> For example GNOME is being spelt in some packages as Gnome, or simply gnome,
> when its right spelling: GNOME. Other project names such as Debian, KDE and
> Linux aren't being correctly capitalised.
I can't help but roll my eyes at this. There are so many valid reasons
to write "linux", "debian", or even "gnome" or "xerox"^W"kde". You can find
some good in examples in the descriptions of devscripts and debhelper
("debian/", "debian package") which do not refer to a proper name and so
don't need to be capitalised.
> Neil Williams has requested me on #456495 to seek a concensus on this
> subject, hence the reason of this message.
Good luck!
--
SEE SHY JO
01-08-2008, 10:10 PM
Russ Allbery
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> I can't help but roll my eyes at this. There are so many valid reasons
> to write "linux", "debian", or even "gnome" or "xerox"^W"kde". You can find
> some good in examples in the descriptions of devscripts and debhelper
> ("debian/", "debian package") which do not refer to a proper name and so
> don't need to be capitalised.
Lintian won't complain about debian/rules. I think the Debian in "debian
package" should be capitalized.
Correct spelling/capitalisation of project names
