[Mesa-dev] docs: consistent language

[Jason Ekstrand]

Three comments:

 1. +1
 2. Khronos has generally standardized on American English in their
specs so I guess that provides some sort of prior art or something.
 3. I'd generally be a fan of encouraging American spellings in common
code as well.  As someone who doesn't use auto-complete, having to
remember which variable is named "color" and which is "colour" would
get painful.  Fortunately, we don't have a whole lot of variation here
but it'd be good to keep consistency.

--Jason

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 12:59 PM Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> wrote:
>
> 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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