Peeve: why "i386"?

[Ceri Davies]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 03:21:03PM +0100, Paul Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 09:35:28AM -0400, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> 
> > Most people even today only know windows, have only foggy ideas of
> > linux, and don't know BSD at all.  I don't see why we should further
> > confuse them with talk of i386.
> 
> And you think windows users, managers, office workers, etc. - they know what
> an IA-32 architecture is do they? But get confused when talking about i386?
> Impressive. Most of the office workers I've worked within in the past didn't
> know the difference between RAM and hard disk storage. Your office must have
> come along quite a way.
> 
> If you know what IA-32 is, but don't know what i386 is, you're not somebody 
> who should be reading the documentation that refers to the phrase "i386" 
> without qualification of what it means. For example:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html
> 
> makes it prefectly clear that an i386 is a PC. Where exactly do you perceive 
> there being a problem? The MD of a local company is not likely to want to 
> know how to re-build his kernel, so won't care whether we refer to i386 or 
> ia32 - he just wants a box that works.
> 
> Of course, if you really want to do it, I'm sure the doc project will take 
> your patches and amend their policy to make it clear that the PCs will be 
> referred to as IA-32 rather than i386. I just don't see the point, as it is 
> likely to cause more ambiguity within the FBSD crowd than it would solve.

Actually, I'd oppose that change.

Ceri
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