What it means
project.english-only says every artifact of this repository is written in English:
documents, code, comments, commit messages, the rules themselves. That mattered more than it
sounds. This repository is worked on in a language that is not English; several of the
people and agents who touch it think in that language; and a paragraph written in it reads
as perfectly fine to whoever wrote it and as noise to everyone else. Review catches a
document. It does not catch a sentence.
How it works
Detecting a language from prose is a research problem, and a gate that guessed would be a
gate nobody trusts. What is decidable is the alphabet. A handful of letters carry diacritics
that occur in Czech, Slovak and Polish and never in English — č ď ě ň ř š ť ů ž, ą ć ę ł ń ś ź ż — and whole scripts are unambiguous on sight: Cyrillic, Greek, the CJK ranges. A
file containing one of those is not English, whatever else is true of it.
This is a partial check and it says so. English prose with a Czech sentence spelled in ASCII passes it, and always will. The rule stays wider than the gate, which is the honest relation between the two; what the gate buys is that the common case — the one that has actually happened here — cannot arrive unnoticed.
Typographic punctuation is allowed by range: this repository's prose uses the em dash, the
curly apostrophe and the ellipsis, and they never reach the test. Two other things are
allowed, and both are declared with a reason in scripts/ci/english-only-allow.txt rather
than by weakening the test:
name <word>— a proper noun whose spelling is its own. Stripped wherever it appears, so a line of English naming one is English.fixture <path> <why>— a file that uses a non-English string as data, to prove the program handles one. A doctest asserting that an identifier's local part is opaque bytes has to contain opaque bytes; that is the test doing its job. The reason is required, and a fixture entry without one makes the check refuse to run rather than silently pass.
Neither exempts a sentence. A comment written in another language inside an exempted file is still a violation of the rule; what the fixture exemption says is that this alphabet test cannot tell prose from data in that file — a limit stated rather than hidden.
How to see it
scripts/ci/english-only-check report, and fail on new debt
scripts/ci/english-only-check --strict fail on any finding, baseline ignoredThe english-only gate runs it on every CI plan. It landed with an empty baseline.
What it does not cover
A sentence of another language spelled in ASCII. "Toto je veta bez diakritiky" passes and always will. The check decides an alphabet, not a language, and the rule is deliberately wider than the gate — stating that plainly is better than a check that implies a guarantee it cannot give.
It also does not read generated trees, session records or the checkout-local layer. A projection carrying a foreign word carries it from its source, and the source is where the finding belongs; a session record quotes what was said, and what was said is not always English.
Why it exists
Because review was the only thing catching it, and review catches a document rather than a sentence. This repository is worked on in a language that is not English, by people and agents who think in it, and a paragraph written in that language reads as perfectly fine to whoever wrote it and as noise to everyone else.
What proves it
The check itself, run against this repository in CI on every change, and
test/cases/138_governance_gates.sh, which proves it by mutation rather than by assertion
that it exists: a Czech letter in an authored file is named with its file and line, a whole
other script is too, a declared proper noun is stripped, a declared fixture is exempt only
with its reason, and the generated trees are out of scope because a projection carrying a
foreign word carries it from its source.
The gate prints its own denominator — how many files it measured and how many fixtures are declared — rather than that count being written here. A number in prose is a number that goes stale, and this one did: widening the selector to shebang scripts moved it the same afternoon it was first written down.