cvs commit: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks chapter.sgml

[David Schultz]

On Wed, May 07, 2003, Hiten Pandya wrote:
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 11:00:18PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> > > Actually, and according to my dictionary, irrelevant is more correct
> > > here.
> > 
> > That wasn't my actual question. :) Let me rephrase. "Given that these two
> > words basically mean the same thing in context, what was the overwhelming
> > necessity of this change?" If the reason was, "To make the meaning
> > slightly more accurate," then we can argue the merits based on that... I'm
> > just curious.
> 
> 	Two reasons:
> 
> 		a) Use simple english which everyone can understand.
> 		Many people from the far east etc do not understand such
> 		words, while they can undersand ``useless'' or
> 		''irrelevant''.  This is also the same reason for my
> 		"automatic to automagic" change.
> 		
> 		b) The 'insignificant' meaning of the word `moot' is
> 		secondary, while it's primary meaning is the opposite

I don't think that there's any requirement that FreeBSD
documentation read like a Henry James novel.  Some people have
colorful writing styles that involve words such as
``automagical'', ``moot'', and ``kludge'', and I'm not convinced
that this is a problem.  Documentation isn't my domain, so I won't
stick my nose into this any further, but unless our translators
and other non-native English speakers have major qualms about
this kind of detail, I do consider this to be gratuitous.

That's not to say that I don't value your contributions; I do.
I just find high-level and technical (as opposed to grammatical)
clarifications more useful.  For instance, changing a section
title in the security chapter from ``S/Key'' to ``One-time
Passwords'' probably un-confused people who weren't aware that we
switched from S/Key to OPIE in 5.0.  It would be really great if
you instead found more bugs like that and fixed them!