Re: Capitalization conventions for Debian release names
On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 12:19:28AM -0700, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> My above mentioned observation is the practice by the people who build
> Debian tends to prefer using lower case. I do not know root cause of
> it. My guess is Unix gurus like lower case. Unix is not PDP-11/VMS (or
> DOS) world where capitalization is more popular.
>
> As you may know, capitalization practice is more popular in American
> English while Brits tend to use lower case for many popular acronyms.
As someone from the UK, I'm slightly bemused by this. UK English
capitalizes acronyms and other abbreviations just as much as US English
does. Television is "TV", not "tv"; compact discs are "CDs", not "cds";
and so on. You may have been given a different impression by
individuals, but that's likely to be the effect of generalized Internet
slang, not standard UK English.
The convention seems to have been "buzz", "rex", etc. since the early
days. The most likely reason, as you said above, is that this is Unix
and the name of the directory was in lower case. I speculate that it
might also have been to avoid confusion with Pixar's "Toy Story"
characters.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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