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From: Christopher Yeoh [mailto:cbkyeoh at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 3:06 PM
To: openstack at nemebean.com; OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [qa] Policy on spelling and grammar

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:24 AM, Ben Nemec <openstack at nemebean.com<mailto:openstack at nemebean.com>> wrote:
On 2013-11-11 13:28, Tim Bell wrote:
As a speaker of the Queen's English, I find flavor to be incorrect.
Does that mean I can -1 any patch that does not use flavour ?

At CERN, we are working with 130 countries in a single community. The
value of the contribution of non-english speakers far exceeds the
occasional misunderstandings.

Giving grammar/spellings -1 excludes major sections of the community
from contribution.

As our aim is meritocracy (in python, computer architecture and design
rather than spelling), I'd propose

- If someone identifies a need for clarification/correction as part of
a review, they also submit the replacement text rather than just -1.
- The submitter incorporates that change into a patch

Agreed.  Whenever possible, a grammar/spelling -1 should include proposed alternatives (I say whenever possible because I've -1'd a few changes where the docstrings were incomprehensible to me, so I couldn't provide a better alternative as I wasn't sure what they were trying to say :-).

I'm much more likely to -1 spelling/grammar issues in the code base than in a commit message. For both cases I agree its important to provide exactly what you want because for a non native english speaker is likely to come up
with many variants which aren't right even if it seems obvious to a native english speaker and there is no easy way for them to check it before resubmitting.

For commit messages I've been more lenient on new contributors and changesets that have already gone through very many iterations as long as it is reasonably understandable by a native english speaker, though as someone else has mentioned in this thread perhaps we do need to consider how confusing it might be for non english speakers.

I don't think we should be -1'ing for punctuation, and I've +1/+2'd before for minor grammar or spelling issues in commit messages, with just a note to fix it if they have to update the patch anyway. The main reason I really dislike +0'ing anything with just a comment is that Gerritt's review request list continues to show that I haven't reviewed it which I find pretty annoying as I keep going back to it.

Totally agree with chris on this.  The +0s tend seem to fall into some weird void.  They exist, but not on the same plane as the rest of the +/-  Perhaps zero had not been invented when Gerrit was first created ;-)

--Rocky

Chris
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