codespell mysteries explained

[Joseph Sutton]

On 22/08/23 12:58 pm, Douglas Bagnall via samba-technical wrote:
> I was trying to run
> 
>   codespell $(git diff origin/master --name-only)
> 
> to catch my typos before CI does, but they seem to find completely 
> disjoint sets of complaints. That is, *none* of the local codespell 
> issues were raised by CI, and vice versa.
> 
> Locally I have "codespell 2.1.0" on Ubuntu 22.04. It doesn't care when I 
> write "secuirty" in a C comment, while CI does. And it does say a lot of
> 
>   python/samba/tests/sddl.py:193: BA ==> BY, BE
> 
> which CI doesn't mention.
> 
> Adding "ba" to .codespellignore makes the "BA" complaints disappear. I 
> would prefer to just ignore uppercase "BA", but when the manpage says
> 
>    Words are case sensitive based on how they are written in
>    the dictionary file
> 
> it is saying you *can't* ignore uppercase only if the codespell 
> dictionary[1] doesn't contain a "BA->..." line. It doesn't.
> 
> [1]/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/codespell_lib/data/dictionary.txt
> 
> The local dictionary also doesn't contain "secuirty". The upstream 
> version does, and it doesn't have the "ba". So that explains everything.
> 
> When I started this email, it was going to be along the lines of "WTF am 
> I missing", but it turns out to be quite simple. If you have an ancient 
> OS (from, say, last year) don't expect to be able to replicate codespell 
> CI locally.
> 
> Douglas
> 

It seems that there is a way to get a more recent dictionary for those 
of us who are stuck on an older version of codespell:

https://github.com/codespell-project/codespell#updating-the-dictionaries

I’m not sure exactly which dictionary the CI will be using, but the 
latest version should at least be closer to it than whatever Ubuntu has.

It might be a good idea to use the ‘-D’ option in codespell.sh to 
specify a particular local dictionary (or dictionaries), so that 
spelling is enforced consistently for everyone.

Joseph