Re: Codespell report for "gawk" (on fossies.org)

[Fossies Administrator]

Hi Wolfgang,

> This is a remarkable achievement, an important step towards product quality. My 
> observations from a quick
> look:
>
> One might not care much about the spelling in ChangeLog files but the .texi and 
> the .hlp files are part of the
> UI and deserve primary attention.
>
> eles else gawk-5.0.1/awk is (perhaps) a typo, but not as indicated in the report. 
> "eles" is a somewhat unlucky
> abbreviation for "elements" ("elems" would be better).

Yes, about the word "eles" I stumbled also, found the suggested "else" 
erroneous but since I had no real idea what would be the correct word
I let it unchanged. Thanks for your interesting explanation.

> The finding regarding "ther" is also interesting: "ther is a 3 
> combinations" indicates a major error, not just a typo. It's risky to 
> use the findings for an automated correction, especially where the 
> length of the bad word is less than six characters or where there is 
> more than one potential replacement.

Exactly. Especially variable and class names, URLs, mail addresses and 
words that directly "touch" some kinds of delimiters or escape characters 
may be problematic, some spelling corrections may be ambiguous, some words 
can be deliberately misspelled and some corrections may have unwanted side 
effects. A vague idea was to make the spelling errors selectable and then 
to create multiple (or even one big) unidiff file(s) but that isn't 
trivial to realize and for e.g. probably not usable by projects using 
GitHub.

> On the other hand, it's a trivial exercise to convert the relevant 
> section of fossies.org/linux/misc/gawk-5.0.1.tar.xz/codespell.html into 
> an awk script to edit all the occurrences into the source code base and 
> would be well worth the effort.

The word "list" in the phrase "Below the sortable list of all 249 found 
occurrences of the 147 spelling error types ..." is a link to an according 
list of the errors in the original test format, it looks for e.g. like

 gawk-5.0.1/awk.h:260: eles  ==> else
 gawk-5.0.1/field.c:1552: succesful  ==> successful
 gawk-5.0.1/io.c:907: non-existant  ==> non-existent
 ...

The use of that file may helpful for some according correcting scripts.

> I don't see the reason for exempting "leapyear".

Hmm, since I found that word often used as variable and I have the 
impression it is also in missing_d/mktime.c (lines 177 and 387)
not a typo?

> Good work!
> Wolfgang
>
> PS: It's interesting that the authors of Fossies overlook (not "oversee") errors in 
> their language: "Here the
> 36 top most of a total..." should read "Here are the 36 topmost of a total..." 
> ;-)

Ah, since the author isn't a native but a pretty bad English speaker
(a.o. https://dict.leo.org/ and Google are his helpers).

Therefore I'm very grateful for such hints, thanks! It's now corrected.

Regards

Jens

> On Wed, 15 Jan 2020 at 03:03, Fossies Administrator <address@hidden> wrote:
>       Hi "gawk"-team,
>
>       the FOSS server fossies.org - also supporting "gawk" - offers a new
>       feature "Source code misspelling reports":
>
>         https://fossies.org/features.html#codespell
>
>       Such reports are normally only generated on request, but as Fossies
>       administrator I have just created (for testing purposes) an analysis for
>       the current "gawk" release 5.0.1:
>
>         https://fossies.org/linux/misc/gawk/codespell.html
>
>       That version-independent (not linked) URL should redirect always to the
>       last report (if available), so currently to
>
>         https://fossies.org/linux/misc/gawk-5.0.1.tar.xz/codespell.html
>
>       Although after a first review some obviously wrong matches ("false
>       positives") are already filtered out (ignored) please inform me if you
>       find more of them so that I can force a new improved check if applicable.
>
>       Just for information there are also two supplemental pages
>
>         https://fossies.org/linux/misc/gawk/codespell_conf.html
>
>       showing some used "codespell" configurations and
>
>         https://fossies.org/linux/misc/gawk/codespell_fps.html
>
>       showing all resulting obvious "false positives".
>
>       Although many of the found errors are in ChangeLog files or a "test"
>       directory I hope that the report can be nevertheless a little bit helpful.
>
>       If appropriate, additional reports for the current or future development
>       versions could be created (but in a special "test" folder that isn't
>       integrated in the Fossies standard services and should - at least
>       principally - also not be accessible by search engines).
>
>       Regards
>
>       Jens
>
>       --
>       FOSSIES - The Fresh Open Source Software archive
>       mainly for Internet, Engineering and Science
>       https://fossies.org/