Re: investigation of SYSLINUX booting problems
Richard Kettlewell writes:
>Bill Mitchell writes:
>>But LILO diskettes can have several alternate (yes, "alternate"; in
>>the sense of "substitute") kernal images. Perhaps three might fit
>>on a single boot diskette, with a boot-time message explaining how to
>>choose between them.
>
>Is this a troll?
>
>My dictionary[1] lists a number of meanings for ``alternate'' as an
>adjective. Only one of them - which is specifically marked as ``US''
>- has anything to do with substitutes:
>
> 9. U.S. a person who substitutes for another; stand-in
>
>That's quite different from ``alternative'' which (again in my
>dictionary) doesn't imply substitution but choice. And in this case,
>choice, rather than substitution, is what's going on.
We've already gone over this. The majority of US dictionaries clearly
state that alternate can be used as a synonym for alternative. Therefore
it would be very, very silly for us to try to feed "bug" reports to
upstream maintainers telling them to change their use of the word
alternate, and not too bright to change them for Debian.
I'm not going to type in my dictionary entry again, but if you
don't believe me, we can dredge up all the old dictionary
entries that were typed in. I don't see anywhere in the documentation
that states that Debian documentation will be written in British
English only.
I thought we had buried this one before; it would be best if we
bury it now.
michaelkjohnson
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