Re: [bug-womb] [PATCH] Spelling mistake

[Karl Berry]

Hi Ludo,

    Hereœôòùs a fixlet

Sure, thanks, installed (though not rebuilt, will let Brandon do that
tomorrow with whatever other pending changes might get done).

    There are other capitalization issues, such as œôòüGvpeœôòý (should be
    œôòüGVPEœôòý), œôòüGuile-sdlœôòý (should be œôòüGuile-SDLœôòý), 
œôòüGuile-ncursesœôòý (should be
    œôòüGuile-Ncursesœôòý), 

Ok, I fixed those.  It comes from the mundane-name: field in
gnupackages.txt; feel free to fix any others you know should be
different than the default of upcasing the first letter, unless the
first three letters are g, n, u, in which case all three are upcased :).

    etc.

You say "etc." as if there was some general rule about how to capitalize
package names.  There isn't.  And very often it is done inconsistently,
even on the package's own web pages.  I wasn't about to bother every
maintainer with such a trivial question.  So when I originally set all
this stuff up, I erred on the conservative side of only explicitly
overriding capitalization where I knew the intended mundane name, such
as GCC.

    Also, some package names and blurbs start with œôòüGNU œôòý while most 
donœôòùt.

Package names and blurbs are two quite different things.  The idea for
package names is to be the same as "package identifier" except for
capitalization.  (And no, package identifiers themselves are far from
perfectly applied, which I try to incrementally work on cleaning up when
I can, but the situation remains messy, and probably always will.)

In the case of blurbs, it may not look like it, but I actually did make
a pass through the file adding "GNU" to the front of a blurb where I
thought it was warranted, which was in about 2/3 of the cases.  It is
clearly a judgement call and I'm sure I made plenty of errors, but as an
example of a case where I think it would be wrong:
blurb: Bash is the shell, or command-line interpreter, of the GNU system.  ...

Here, the repetition of "GNU" would read badly.

Another example:
blurb: Spell is a command-line spell-checking program.  It reads through a

Here, the blurb is written to talk about the program, which has a number
of instantations, its GNU version being just one.  Could the text be
rewritten so a leading "GNU" would be appropriate?  Sure.  ("The GNU
Spell package contains ...").  Is it worth the trouble?  Not in my
humble opinion :).

Best,
Karl