On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 10:51:24PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote: > Branden, do you have an argument for why capitalization should be > discouraged?
We went over this in the list archives the last time the issue came up and Manoj planted his feet. My reasons are two: 1) I think it's bad style to capitalize something that isn't a title or a sentence. 2) It's possible to give the "ucfirst and period at end" crowd what they want via a package browsing interface. You just manipulate the package description string that you are given. The reverse transformation is not reliably possible. Consider the following hypothetical package description: "Description: GNOME-based game; you're an ambulance driver and you've got to keep your patients from arriving at the hospital D.O.A." Now, needless to say, the above example is way too long, but you get the idea. Would you want this to end up as: "Description: gNOME-based game; you're an ambulance driver and you've got to keep your patients from arriving at the hospital D.O.A"? The leading "mandatory" capital letter and trailing period are noise, not signal. Thus, they should be added where noise isn't a problem. -- G. Branden Robinson | Communism is just one step on the Debian GNU/Linux | long road from capitalism to [EMAIL PROTECTED] | capitalism. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Russian saying
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