[Popcon-developers] Bug#699538: popularity-contest: typo in description

[Justin B Rye]

Bill Allombert wrote:
> Chris Bannister wrote:
>> First line, second paragraph reads:
>> This information helps Debian making decisions such as which packages
>> 
>> this should be:
>> This information helps Debian make decisions such as which packages
> 
> Dear Debian L10N English team,
> I received the bug report above and I like to know what is the correct spelling.

Chris is right.

It would be idiomatic (slightly more formal) English to say "helps
Debian *in* making decisions" (or "helps Debian to make decisions", or
"assists Debian in making decisions" would work too).  But without the
"in" it's more idiomatic for "help" to behave as a modal verb: "helps
Debian make decisions".

(You *can* "help somebody doing something", but that only means you
assisted them *while* they were doing something - for instance you can
"help an old woman wearing a purple hat".)

> Description-en: Vote for your favourite packages automatically

This is a capitalised verb phrase, whereas DevRef recommends an
uncapitalised noun phrase - something like

  Description-en: tool for automatically voting for your favourite packages

but that's not an improvement in this case.

>  The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will
>  periodically anonymously submit to the Debian developers
>  statistics about the most used Debian packages on this system.
>  .
>  This information helps Debian making decisions such as which packages
>  should go on the first CD. It also lets Debian improve future versions
>  of the distribution so that the most popular packages are the ones which
>  are installed automatically for new users.

There's nothing here that really needs a rewrite, but if I was going
to do one I suppose I'd suggest:

  Description-en: package usage census-taker
   The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will
   periodically submit anonymized statistics to the Debian developers
   about the most used Debian packages on this system.
   .
   This information helps Debian make decisions such as which packages
   should go on the first CD. It also lets Debian improve future versions
   of the distribution so that the packages installed automatically for
   new users are the most popular ones.

-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package