Re: For the Abolishment of "Ports"
At 08:46 +0200 1999-08-10, Juergen A. Erhard wrote:
I'm not sure how to do this, but I'd love it if we were to remove all
mentions of "Ports" from Debian (both on www.debian.org and in the
various documents).
It may just be my NetBSD experience talking, but they call all of
their architectures "Ports", because they are all ports of NetBSD.
And all of our architectures are ports of Debian, including i386.
Thus this usage makes perfect sense to me.
I'd propose replacing it with "Platforms" or maybe "Architectures"
(Platforms is more generally known, I think... especially to non-CS
folk).
We already had (a couple times) the discussion that
a) some feel that parts of the Debian maintainership are not very
friendly to non-ia32 people.
And you think the use of the word "port" causes that (or that
changing it to a different word is gonna have any effect)? I don't
buy it.
b) there are even some packages now that are not developed on ia32,
but instead their main platform is alpha, for example. Which
means for those packages, ia32 is a "Port".
As far as I'm concerned, every architecture my packages run on is a port.
This is just a change of *terms*... but language is pretty important
to shape minds (IMNSHO).
I think violence is better for shaping minds. ;-)
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy) Debian GNU/Linux Developer
<URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org>
<URL:http://web.espy.org/> <URL:http://www.debian.org/>
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