I don't hate spelling fixes at whole, but it irritates me when people
`fixing' spelling don't understand exact meaning of the text they change.
Examples from 2.1.107 (only an excerpt as I don't want my mouse to die
of attrition):
-! Routine to print asciiz-string at DS:SI
+! Routine to print ASCII string at DS:SI
... ASCIIZ is really correct and stands for "zero-terminated ASCII"
- printk("enabling Symmetric IO mode ... ");
+ printk("enabling symmetric IO mode... ");
The capitalization in original message was IMHO intentional as it's the name
of the mode.
- occurred; hopefully real BIOSes don't assume much. */
+ occurred; hopefully real BIOSs don't assume much. */
English is not my native language, but the former seems more appropriate
to me.
- "cpu family\t: %c\n"
+ "CPU family\t: %c\n"
The worst one -- this breaks interface between the kernel and apps.
- "RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid ramdisk image starting at %d.\n",
+ "RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid RAM disk image starting at %d.\n",
I see no need for doing inconsistent changes in device naming.
With an exception of documentation files, most of them being intended for
reading by ordinary users, all other texts have been written by hackers for
other hackers and a person who doesn't understand the context is usually unable
to fully understand the meaning of the comment/message/string. People should
not change such things blindly by just doing string replace without having
understood their semantics and preferably sending them to the author first (I
know it happened in case of Documentation/svga.txt, but it should have happened
for changes in all other files maintained by me as well).
Have a nice fortnight
-- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth "The world is coming to an end... SAVE YOUR BUFFERS!!"- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu