Tag Archives: codespell

ANNOUNCE: codespell 1.4

codespell 1.4 is out! Nothing really new, just a maintenance release: 1 bug fix and some new entries to the dictionary. See the entire announcement on its mailing list.

As per patches I’m receiving it seems that codespell is being successfully used by opensource projects. I’m glad codespell can help those projects, particularly people who don’t have English as their mother tongue as I don’t. It’s also an opportunity to people starting on a project, as I said in last LinuxCon Brazil.

I’m not submitting patches anymore to Linux kernel myself using codespell because after doing that twice I started to receive a lot of emails from people using get_maintainer script. It’s very annoying to filter the good emails (that were indeed addressed to me) from that that I was in CC just because there was a misspelling that my patch fixed. Since that patch touched 2463 files, it’s very common to have my name in the output of get_maintainer :-( . I’m still trying to figure out how to properly filter that without losing important emails. Any tips (I’m a GMail user)?

Back to codespell announcement, the only missing item in TODO is to be able to separate comments, strings and source code in order to fix misspellings only in the first 2. Nonetheless codespell seems to be doing a good job without that feature and unless someone step in to implement it without impacting the parse time too much, my plan is to keep as is.

Go get it (and package for your distro) while it’s fresh!

ANNOUNCE: codespell 1.2

Since I created a mailing list for codespell, the announcements here will not have as many details as before. Checkout the new version of codespell: http://groups.google.com/group/codespell/browse_thread/thread/bce1a6f83d4bbd85

One of the issues I with codespell was that it was trying to parse cscope.out, since it’s a text file. On Linux Kernel this file can get very big and besides taking much longer, sometimes it was running out of memory :-) . Now codespell has an option to ignore files, even text ones. It’s as easy as passing –skip=”*.eps,cscope.out” (notice this is useful for ignoring eps images too). Another useful thing (not much for Linux Kernel though) is proper detection of encoding by using chardet.

codespell 1.1-rc1

I’m glad to announce the first RC of codespell 1.1. I decided to let the biggest feature for the next version and release 1.1 with the small but important features that were already implemented. This new version comes with the following features:

  • Verbosity level: tired of seeing so many things printed while the fixes are taking place? Now you can filter what you see
  • Exclusion list: there are cases in which the codespell spots a false positive, but disabling the entry in the dictionary will prevent it from fixing many other places. This is particularly true when there are names in source code. In Linux kernel I’ve seen some names with “Taht” and “Teh” that were incorrectly fixed to “That” and “The”. Now we have a file with lines that are exclude from the ones codespell will fix. Hopefully such lines will not change very often and we can maintain a file per project for future executions of codespell in each project. I’m maintaining one for the Linux kernel. It’s in data/linux-kernel.exclude.
  • Interactive mode: for those fixes that are not done automatically (because they have more than one possible fix), now we can interactively decide on each one. I recommend for everyone interested in this feature to run codespell once without this option to fix the automatic ones and another time to go through the other fixes.
  • Stats (summary) of the changes: are you interested how many times a word was misspelled? Now codespell can display a summary of all the fixes it has done.

I was particularly worried about the increase in runtime when using the exclusion list. However it proved to be very fast when excluding the lines by using their hashes. I can successfully parse the entire Linux kernel tree within 1min30s in my laptop with slow HD. The biggest feature that I’ve left for the next version is to allow changes to be applied only to parts of the source code like comments and strings. I expect to implement this for a future 1.2 version.

Besides these new features, there are some fixes to the dictionary. Thanks to all of you who have sent me fixes and suggestions. I’m glad to see patches generated by codespell been applied to other opensource projects that I’m not the one to send. As of now, I’ve seen patches been applied to: Linux Kernel, oFono, ConnMan, FreeBSD, LLVM, clang, EFL and others that I don’t remember right now.

For those who prefer to wait for a stable release, I’m also releasing codespell 1.0.2 with fixes only to the dictionary.

As always, you can download codespell packages from:

http://packages.profusion.mobi/codespell/

Repositories are available at:

http://git.profusion.mobi/cgit.cgi/lucas/codespell/

https://github.com/lucasdemarchi/codespell

ANNOUNCE: codespell 1.0

I’m glad to announce codespell 1.0! After 3 RCs and patches submitted to several projects, I thought it was stable enough to call it 1.0. You can download the 1.0 version below:

http://packages.profusion.mobi/codespell/codespell-1.0.tar.bz2

See my previous post if you are willing to know what codespell is or read the README file inside the package.

I have already filled a TODO file with ideas for the next version. They came to mind after I’ve generated a giant patch for the Linux kernel. It is the biggest patch I’ve ever produced with codespell. Really, I think it’s the biggest patch I’ve produced ever. I hope Linus accept that patch as is because without the changes I’m planning for codespell 1.1, it’s a pain to fix some corner cases.

Some people are sending me suggestions and more misspellings to my email. I appreciate those emails and seeing they are successfully using codespell in other projects. If you want a faster way to have your changes incorporated into codespell, you may also send patches through git-send-email or just use my repository on github to send me pull requests.

UPDATE (04/11/2011): Linus accepted the patch. There’s also a discussion with further improvements for codespell on LKML.