Re: Upper/lowercase issues in package descriptions
Hi Simon,
On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 08:14:49AM +0200, Simon Kainz wrote:
> this is my first posting to QA, so here I go:
welcome to QA ;-)
> Trying to work on WNPP packages and looking through several package
> descriptions, i noticed that several feature intermixed upper- and
> lowercase version of the package/tool name.
>
> For example lsof:
>
> skainz@myhost:~$ apt-cache show lsof
> Package: lsof
> Version: 4.81.dfsg.1-1
> Installed-Size: 444
> Maintainer: Norbert Tretkowski <nobse@debian.org>
> Architecture: amd64
> Replaces: lsof-2.0.35, lsof-2.0.36, lsof-2.0.38, lsof-2.2 (<< 4.73)
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1)
> Conflicts: suidmanager (<< 0.50)
> Description: List open files
> Lsof is a Unix-specific diagnostic tool. Its name stands
> for LiSt Open Files, and it does just that. It lists
>
>
> It here says "Lsof ..." in the description field, which, for me, quite
> "hurts the eye". So as I am not a native speaker (despite for german), i
> wonder wether this is an issue, or OK, because it starts the sentence
> and should therefore be uppercase.
I think it is common practice to capitalize even an abbreviation when it
starts a sentence.
> I also found several other typos, missing articles (a/an), incomplete
> ellipses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis) and the like.
>
> Is this something to spend work on (which i'd like to do), to increase
> the quality of Debian packages' descriptions? Or is it too picky and
> just annoying maintainers fixing typos/grammar issues/... ?
If there really is a grammatical error in package description or
documentation then this merits a bug report (with severity=minor).
However, as you have noticed yourself, one should be careful with
one's judgement when one is not a native speaker. You might want o get
in touch with the Smith project who's goal is to improve the quality
of english texts in debian
http://wiki.debian.org/I18n/SmithReviewProject
Cheers -Ralf
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