241181 - inconsistent spelling of cancelled or canceled in Mozilla.

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Patrick]

This probably affects several products/components.

Comment 1

[Patrick]

[Darn, that one fired of too quickly.]

Spawned of from bug 241101 and notably bug 241101 comment 3: The word
cancelled/canceled is spelled inconsistenly in Mozilla. 

According to lxr it's almost 50/50 between "cancelled" and "canceled"
    629 cancelled
    552 canceled

This bug is similar to bug 237517 which deals with inconsistent spelling on the
Mozilla web pages.

If i have to pick, i'd go for "cancelled" :)

Comment 2

[Bruce Davidson]

Grepping the source almost all uses of the word cancel[l]ed are in variable
names etc. This is annoying to developers, but I don't propose to go and fix
these unless there's demand for it.

I will however attach a patch to fix the one case this occurs in the UI (in the
download manager and its associated help).

Note to language pedants:

"cancelled" is the only correct spelling in UK (and, I believe) Australian/NZ
English
Both "cancelled" and "canceled" are accepted in US spelling, although
"cancelled" wins by a 4:1 margin on a google search. (Assuming the vast majority
of sites returned by google.com are US sites).

I know that the default localisation is technically the US English language
pack. Realistically though there are no active localisation efforts for other
English dialects, and I think the default should therefore use the spelling that
is most applicable, i.e. "cancelled".

Patch coming up to change user visible instances of "canceled" -> "cancelled".

Comment 3

[Bruce Davidson]

Attachment: Proposed patch to fix use of "canceled" in user-visible text. Fixes Mozilla and Firefox.

Comment 4

[Bruce Davidson]

Comment on attachment 146719 [details] [diff] [review]
Proposed patch to fix use of "canceled" in user-visible text. Fixes Mozilla and Firefox.

Requesting r/sr (rs=?) on this patch for 1.8 trunk.

Comment 5

[Bruce Davidson]

Attachment: New patch - includes .properties files that I had previously missed

Previous patch missed out .properties files. I have now included these in the
patch (an extra 6 occurrences).

Comment 6

[Jason Summers]

"Canceled" is the preferred U.S. spelling. All American dictionaries include
"canceled", but not all of them include "cancelled".

$ grep '^cancel' /usr/share/dict/words
cancel
canceled
canceling
cancellation
cancellations
cancels

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Note that changing this without having a clear guideline somewhere as to the
"right" spelling in the Mozilla codebase will only lead to new inconsistencies
getting checked in later....

Also note that you want to remove review requests on obsolete patches, usually.

Comment 8

[Bruce Davidson]

Found the option in google to restrict results to US sites: 2,690,000 for
"cancelled", 849,000 for "canceled" - so "cancelled" would still appear to be
the dominant usage. comment 7 is a good point, but not sure who is empowered to
make such decisions, drivers?

Comment 9

[Patrick]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Note that changing this without having a clear guideline somewhere as to the
> "right" spelling in the Mozilla codebase will only lead to new inconsistencies
> getting checked in later....

True enough. 
Is there any specific place in the coding guidelines where this should go?

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Bruce comment #8:
> ... not sure who is empowered to make such decisions, drivers?

is this point already approved, per neil's review+?

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

Well I'm British, so I'm biased :-)

Comment 13

[Cullen Newsom]

> (In reply to comment #7)
> > Note that changing this without having a clear guideline somewhere as to the
> > "right" spelling in the Mozilla codebase will only lead to new inconsistencies
> > getting checked in later....
> 
> True enough. 
> Is there any specific place in the coding guidelines where this should go?

See rule 2 in the following link.

http://www.angelfire.com/wi3/englishcorner/grammar/rules/verbspell.html

or maybe someone should seek out a real, bona fide, spelling bee champion or
something.  (In reply to comment #9)

Comment 15

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=canceled
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=cancelled

What should we do here? I'd create a patch, you just need to make a decision what to change.

Comment 16

[d]

After reading through the posts here, it appears to me that "Cancelled" is what we should use. Not only is it used in almost all English dialects, but it also appears to be the most used in the US.

(It should probably be added to the built-in US dictionary as well.)

Comment 17

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

no activity for a while and not important enough