Bug#714015: ri-li: Spelling and grammar errors in description text

[Justin B Rye]

Chris King wrote:
>   * Fixed minor spelling and grammar errors. (Closes: #714015)

It would be a pity to fix _some_ of the errors and leave the
description still in need of work!

[...]
> -Maintainer: Debian Games Team <pkg-games-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org>
> +Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com>

My patch also has the advantage of not doing this.

[...]
>  Description: a toy train simulation game

The Debian Developer's Reference (6.2.2) recommends not starting the
synopsis with an article.

> - Ri-Li is a game in which you drive a toy wood engine across many levels 
> - and collect all the coaches to win.
> + Ri-Li is a game in which you drive a toy wooden engine across many levels 
> + and collect all of the coaches to win.

"Toy wooden X" is unidiomatic English for "wooden toy X"; and since
it's a steam locomotive, not an accurate model of a modern train (or
a Stirling engine carved out of mahogany), it should probably say so.

This would be a more useful description if it mentioned that ri-li
uses the basic game mechanic of "snake", but never mind, I'll stick to
reviewing the language rather than the content.

>   .
>   Full-features:

Is that meant to be a subjectless verb, or a plural noun, or what?
Whatever it is, replace it with English.

> -  - 14 languages: Arabic, Breton, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French,
> -  German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak,
> -  Spanish, Swedish.
> -  - Colorful animated wood engine.
> -  - 40 levels in this first version
> -  - 3 beautiful musics and many sound effects.
> +  - 14 languages: Arabic, Breton, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, 
> +    German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, 
> +    Swedish.

I would suggest reordering these features so that the i18n comes after
the actual functionality.  Also, you've got recursive colons; make
this list-within-a-list parenthetical instead.

> +  - Colorful, animated wooden engine.

This could reasonably have an indefinite article, and there's no need
for the comma.  Again, s/wooden engine/wooden toy steam locomotive/

> +  - 40 levels in this first version.

But this isn't the first version!  Checking the home page I see that
version 2.0.0 had 50 levels and that development stopped in 2007.

> +  - 3 beautiful music tunes and many sound effects.

"Music tunes" is better, but still not normal English.  Just say
"tunes".

Also, since I'm already editing it, I might as well reformat the list
slightly to match the debian-l10n-english "house style" (which here
means using asterisks instead of hyphens and formatting the full list
as one sentence).
  
>  Package: ri-li-data
>  Recommends: ri-li
> @@ -31,7 +32,7 @@
>  Architecture: all
>  Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}
>  Description: data files for Ri-li, a toy train simulation game

We tend to recommend something along the lines of:

   Description: toy train simulation game - data files

(Standardising on this style means less work for translators.)

> - Ri-Li is a game in which you drive a toy wood engine across many levels 
> - and collect all the coaches to win.
> + Ri-Li is a game in which you drive a toy wooden engine across many levels 
> + and collect all of the coaches to win.
>   .
> - This package provide data files for the game.
> + This package provides data files for the game.
> 

Meanwhile: does anybody have any idea why it's called "ri-li"?
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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