[Mesa-dev] docs: consistent language

[Ian Romanick]

On 3/15/21 5:44 AM, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> TLDR; I'm proposing to standardize on US English in our public-facing
> documentation.
> 
> I proposed an MR a while back that changed the only occurrence of the
> UK English spelling "optimisation" for the US English spelling
> "optimization", which is already used 34 times in the docs. I've done
> similar changes in the past.
> 
> But this time Ian brought up the good point that picking a preferred
> language should probably be done using group consensus on the mailing
> list than just picking what's currently most popular.

Over the years we've had quite a few contributions from folks in many
different English spelling parts of the world where the UK spelling is
the norm... though I don't think there have been that many from the UK
itself. :)  I suggested getting some group consensus because I didn't
want any of those people to feel left out or undervalued.

If anyone doesn't feel comfortable speaking out publicly about this,
please feel free to contact Erik or me privately.

> So, I hereby propose to pick US English as our default language for
> user-facing documentation.
> 
> I'm not proposing to force anyone to use a particular English variant
> for things like comments, commit messages or variable names. I don't
> think there's much value in enforcing that, and I think it'd be
> perfectly fine if any particular driver wanted to pick a particular
> variant of English.
> 
> The main reason I want to standardize on an English variant is that I'm
> trying create a word-list for domain-specific/technical language to
> detect spelling mistakes in the docs more easily. And not having to add
> both US and UK English words makes this list easier to maintain. I'm
> not planning on going 100% systematically though the dictionary to
> detect UK English words that might be in my system dictionary, just to
> fix the words that currently cause me (a tiny amount of) pain ;)
> 
> The main reason why I'm proposing US English over for instance UK
> English is that this seems to be the dominant variant currently in the
> documentation. So it seems like the pragmatic choice to me.
> 
> Thoughts? Any objections to sticking to US English in the docs?
> 
> The MR in question:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/8572
> 
> Ian's response:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/8572#note_808593
> 
> Previous changes:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/6864
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/6894
> 
> 
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