Review: fail(9) style/grammar (was Re: svn commit: r192908 ...)

[Tim Kientzle]

Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
> ... I think that the new
> sentence-->new line may also relate to having two spaces
> between sentences -- I think that (e.g.) "e.g." should be okay.

It's mostly about keeping diffs easy to read.
Changes that add, remove, or edit a single sentence
are pretty common.
If every sentence starts on a new line, then such
changes only affect a couple of lines.
Nroff will wrap paragraphs for you, so this doesn't
affect the formatted output.

The alternative is usually to word-wrap blocks
of text in your editor.  In that case, editing
even one word (and then re-wrapping) can affect
the rest of the paragraph.  This causes many-line
diffs that are a lot harder to read.

So the rule is "every sentence starts on a new line".

In particular, "e.g.," and "i.e." never start or
end a sentence, so they're unaffected by this rule.
However, I personally try to avoid Latin abbreviations
such as "e.g." and "i.e." in my own writing.
I strongly prefer "for example" to "e.g.".
For "i.e.", I generally find that it can be replaced
with a sentence break, semicolon, or even a comma splice.
Opinions differ, of course.

Tim