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Re: Final warning (Re: The Second Great Spelling Check)

On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 02:30:13PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> [nothing]

Hmm, apparently GnuPG ate the body of my message.  Here it is again.

-- 
 - mdz
--- Begin Message --- 
On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 11:39:21PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 12:20:38PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote:
> 
> > I used ispell + some scripts which would exctract the Description from
> > control files.  After the spelling check I used a text editor to further
> > correct the ones that had spelling mistakes (on the theory that errors
> > travel in groups).  Then I used templates to turn the diffs into
> > bugreports.  See bug#18878 (archived) for a simple example, and #18914 for
> > a more complex one.  I've had no negative reactions about them, and all of
> > those bugs have been closed by now.
> 
> I wrote a patch to make ispell smart about the Debian control file format
> (see bug #119782), seeded the dictionary with package names and parts
> thereof, and in chunks over the course of the past month and a half,
> spell-checked my entire available file.  The diff is available at:
> 
> http://people.debian.org/~mdz/spelling/corrections.diff.gz
> 
> I would appreciate some feedback before I start filing bugs.

It has been about a month now.  Several people have corrected their
packages, and I have done a complete second round of checks incorporating
feedback and for consistency with the newly-created supplementary
dictionary.  I have backed off in some especially pedantic cases because i
don't want to argue with hundreds of maintainers over minor errors.

The diff at the above URL is the final version that I am about to use for
filing bugs (about 1200 of them).  The bug reports will go to maintonly@bugs
and look like this:

<example>
From: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
To: maintonly@bugs.debian.org
Subject: #PACKAGE#: Spelling error in description

Package: #PACKAGE#
Severity: minor

This is an automated bug report.

I have recently conducted a mass spelling check of Debian package
descriptions.  In the process, some other errors were also detected,
such as capitalization, word wrap, and indentation problems.

Some notable guidelines that I used in the check include:

- Capitalization

  The names of languages (English, French, etc.) are capitalized in
  English.  Acronyms should be in all capital letters.

- Abbreviation

  In general, words should not be abbreviated as part of the
  description.  Exceptions include standard abbreviations like "etc.".
  This is especially important for proper keyword searches.

- Word joining

  For various reasons, technical terms tend to be artificially joined
  to form new words, like "bugreport".  While this may be acceptable
  in an informal context, such words should be written separately in
  package descriptions, for clarity and to aid in searching.

In some cases where there the spelling check uncovered other errors, I
have made other edits in the diff for purposes of grammar and clarity.

There appear to be one or more errors in the description for this
package.  A unified diff follows at the end of this message.  You
should be able to apply it to your source tree by piping this message
directly into a command line like:

        patch /home/me/somewhere/mypackage/debian/control

There is a chance that this may not work if your control has been
modified from the version of your source package in the Debian
archive.  If so, you will have to apply the diff by hand.  When doing
so, please take note if there are multiple corrections on the same
line of the diff.

</example>

The following packages are reported fixed by their maintainers, but not yet
uploaded:

dpkg-doc
prozgui
code2html
semantic
user-de

I will not be filing bugs for those packages (but I will check up on them
later, so beware).  If anyone has any comments or suggestions (or pleas of
"please don't!"), send them now.

-- 
 - mdz

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