in reply to Re^3: The Björk Situation
in thread The Björk Situation

You miss the point. Yes, those dictionary-ish things will tell you what to look for, but they won't tell you how to look. You can't just blindly search and replace, you need to parse the files. And to figure out what bits of code to change you need to understand the documentation - see for example GD::Graph, where at most you would want to change some headings but you most definitely DON'T want to change the word colour (or color) anywhere else.

This CAN NOT be reliably automated. What might be worthwhile would be grepping over your CPAN mirror, finding all mentions of /colou?r/ and friends, manually checking that there really is a problem, and then notifying authors and perhaps submitting patches. And repeating this occasionally to catch any new modules, while being careful not to repetitively annoy authors who don't consider this to be important. Considering how much work is involved here, you might want to talk about it on the perl-qa list before doing anything.

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Re^5: The Björk Situation
by mattr (Curate) on Feb 22, 2006 at 16:11 UTC
    Thanks for your detailed comment. Though I'm not going to do anything as drastic as pursue an American English vs. European English flame across CPAN! Yikes!

    To tell you the truth all I wanted was a way to find modules so when I type color I get the ones with Colour methods/modules too. I think a simple grep would make a big difference over the current state of affairs, hence my recommendation. Parsing need not be so involved; what pod viewers show as boldface would do I think. Even just module names would be useful. Instead we are going to have a new module called Wx::FarbFinder because a German guy likes to use the German name for color, even though CPAN is otherwise all English (except for some Japanese signatures maybe).

      Ah, OK, I misunderstood. Certainly a fairly dumb algorithm would be sufficient for searching. Sadly, I don't think the code for search.cpan is open.

      Incidentally, is anyone else here as amused as I am by how progressively more broken the lovely Icelandic songstress's ö is getting?

        Thanks. Actually only the B, r and k come through okay on my browser.. though I think Bjork (the singer with the umlaut) is fabulous. The j and o translate to four symbols.