Again: "metapackage", "meta package" or "meta-package" (Was: Accepted cdd 0.5.3 (source all))
On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Frank S. Thomas wrote:
I suggested that Lintian should check the spelling of metapackage, see
#476681 for details. Prior to the bug report there was brief discussion[1]
in debian-l10-english about the "correct" spelling of metapackage and the
consensus was to go with the majority opinion that is "metapackage". I'm
curious which dictionary votes for meta-package.
Cheers,
Sorry, I forgot the reference:
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-english/2008/04/msg00006.html
Ahh, thanks for the hint. But IMHO a "voting" between maintainers is
not really a clever method to find the correct spelling. Considering
that I'm probably the author of quite a lot of those descriptions and
my language skills as non-native speaker are not good enough to decide
what might be proper English and that this might be the case for other
authors as well, the voting is done by perhaps a majority of uneducated
persons (the problem of any "democratic" decision ;-) ). I tried
Emacs with ispell dictionary british which did not know metapackage and
suggested either "meta package" or "meta-package". I'm keeping
Ben Armstrong in CC who is a native speaker and he used in the Debian
Junior packages the spelling "meta package".
Even if debian-l10n-english might be read by enough native speakers
to trust them I'm not fully convinced because only a single ("potentially")
native speaker (I don't know Justin B Rye, but Christian is French and
you are German) responded. So I like a unification of the spelling but
I would like it to be based on a deeper research on this issue.
Kind regards and thanks for the good idea of a lintian check
Andreas.
PS: Please CC me, I'm not subscribed to debian-l10n-english@lists.debian.org
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