[Mesa-dev] docs: consistent language

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Fri, 2021-03-26 at 18:22 +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-03-15 at 13:44 +0100, 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.
> > 
> > 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?
> 
> OK, so almost two weeks has passed, and I've only gotten a single
> objection to the proposal, but a handfull of variations of voices in
> favor of the proposal.
> 
> I suspect this is as close to a consensus we're going to reach. Since
> it's not 100% consensus, I think maybe the best option is to take
> Kenneth Grauke's suggestion of making this a recommendation rather
> than
> a rule.
> 
> So my plan is to write up a patch for the docs that explains that we
> recommend writing docs in US English. That should IMO make it clear
> that we don't require people to spell-check to make sure that they're
> using the "right" variation of English. At the same time, it's clear
> enough that we're happy about patches moving towards US English.

I've had the MR up here for a few weeks, but it hasn't gotten any r-b
or a-b tags yet:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/9912

Anyone interested in reviewing it?