Re: Configure.help editorial policy

Dominik Mierzejewski
2001-12-26T23:35:32Z

On Wednesday, 26 December 2001, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 05:44:36PM +0000, Riley Williams <rhw@memalpha.cx> wrote:
> | >> I take it this is your way of volunteering to always keep all
> | >> kernel documentation accurate as well as answer questions from
> | >> newbies who've never seen 'KiB' before ? ;)
> |
> | > One of the arguments for the KiB declaration, despite the ugliness
> | > of "kibibytes", is that a newbie seeing "32KiB" is quite likely to
> | > deduce what's meant from context. Let's not exaggerate the
> | > difficulties here.
> |
> | Alternatively, deal with this problem the same way the "This may also be
> | built as a module..." comment is - either include it several thousand
> | times in Configure.help or (better still) have the configuration tools
> | spit it out automatically every time the need for it crops up. The
> | following ruleset could easily be implemented even in the `make config`
> | and `make menuconfig` parsers, and should be just as easy in CML2.
> | Applying rule (1) will result in a considerable reduction in the size of
> | the file Documentation/Configure.help as it currently stands.
> |
> | Comments, anybody?
>
> I like this!

I second this. Being a translator of the file in question, I have to deal
with ten slightly different versions of "You may also compile this as
a module...". So I have ten slighlty different translations of this text,
too, in the name of accuracy.

Although I thought there was an agreement that decimal kilobyte is kB,
and binary kilobyte is KiB, decimal megabyte is MB, binary megabyte is MB
and so on, wasn't there?

--
"The Universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."
-- Sheridan to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"The Geometry of Shadows"
Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <rathann(at)we.are.one.pl>