Subject: Re: bug#48592: [PATCH 0/2] Support plural forms of Author and Maintainer library headers

From: Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 May 2021 10:43:40 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> From: Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Sat, 22 May 2021 22:25:19 +0200
>> 
>> It was already possible to specify multiple authors using the "Author"
>> header, but the same was not possible for maintainers.  Because some
>> packages have multiple maintainers, which cannot or don't want to be
>> subsumed under some organisation's name, this adds support for
>> specifying multiple maintainers as well.
>> 
>> this also adds support for using "Authors" and "Maintainers" as the
>> names of the header fields instead of just the singular forms.
>
> Why do we need these additions?

OCD and grammar.

> Couldn't we keep using Author and Maintainer?

Of course. But why?

> Having both variants immediately begs the question which is preferable
> and why, arguments about style, and other bikeshedding.

The answer seems obvious to me.  Do it like (nearly?) all natural
languages do it: If n=1 then singular, else (n>1) plural.

> Unless there's a good reason for adding new headings, I'd prefer to
> make do with what we already have.

Grammatical mistakes tend to be distracting, especially if you see the
same one over and over again, year after year.

I was expecting this to be noncontroversial.  ;)