Re: Bug#139957: period at the end of short description?

[Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>]

On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 11:41, Branden Robinson wrote:

> I second this.  

Thanks (and to Josip as well).

> We should also discourage capitalization of the first
> letter in a package description.  (I.e., don't make it a capital letter
> if it wouldn't be one in the middle of a sentence.)

I am rather neutral on this one.  And from a somewhat brute-force
analysis of the Packages file on my system, there isn't a clear
consensus:

walters@space-ghost> perl -le '$|=1; open(F, q(</usr/share/dict/words)); my @words = map {chomp $_; $_} <F>;  while (<>) { if (/^Description: (\w+)/) { my $word = $1; if ($word =~ /^[A-Z]/ and grep {$_ eq lc($word)} @words) { print qq($word);}}};' < /var/lib/dpkg/available > /tmp/capitalized-words
walters@space-ghost> wc /tmp/capitalized-words =(egrep '^Description' /var/lib/dpkg/available)
   4714    4714   28867 /tmp/capitalized-words
   8596   60773  465658 /tmp/zshhwOH43

Granted, this is not a very scientific statistical sampling, as a lot of
the words which begin with a capital letter are also an acronym or a
proper noun; e.g. GNU, GNOME, X, LaTeX...

Branden, do you have an argument for why capitalization should be
discouraged?






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