One item I noted whilst checking spelling in package descriptions is there is variation in the spelling due to national variations in English spelling.
Although it goes against my patriotic instincts, should Debian prefer the US spelling of words which vary between variants of English? Whilst it is becoming less crucial as 3rd party search engines and other tools know about these variations in spelling, I think consistency would: a) Make it easier to find packages. I did miss a useful package, at least once, because I used the wrong spelling of "color" in searching for it. b) Make it (marginally) easier to automate parts of the package description translation. Here we could automate the translation back into proper English ;) Since there is currently a check in Lintian for spelling it would be easy to add automated tests to this tool for the most common cases, either to bulk file bugs, or merely to advise when packages are updated. As no one else seems to have raised the issue before, I'd suggest it be added to lintian as an advisory thing since clearly not that many people are (knowingly) troubled by it. A few packages are of non-US origin, and have the alternative spelling as part of the proper name of the package (e.g. hscolour). It would obviously be necessary to preserve the proper names, in most cases the description is likely to include the correct spelling if the word is relevant to the packages purpose. Am I naive in thinking those who spell the same way I do will prefer consistency over the status quo? Would it be smarter to make the tools that search package descriptions aware of common variations in spelling? We'd have to agree on which American spellings are correct! ;) Notes: See /usr/share/lintian/lib/Spelling.pm Based on my current random set of repositories (not all "official"). apt-cache search <word> | wc -l color 413 colour 106 center 95 centre 12 analyse 82 analyze 166 licence 10 Handy reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SpNeo/Spelling_Guide
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