[Mesa-dev] docs: consistent language

[Eric Anholt]

+1 to all of this.

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 1:54 PM Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
>
> 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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