Re: Use of plural

[Justin B Rye <jbr@edlug.org.uk>]

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> "The <name> program in this package will change the hardware (MAC) "
> "address of all ethernet cards in your system (by default) to match the "
> "<vender-net> node address. "
> 
> I wonder if it is correct. As German I would say that each card has an
> address and therefore "adresses of all ethernet cards" or "address of
> each ethernet card" would express the function in a better way.

Out of context it's not obvious which of two possible things it's
doing; either way I'd want to rephrase it slightly to be unambiguous:

A) "The <name> program in this package will change the hardware (MAC) "
   "address of every ethernet card in the system (by default) to match the "
   "system's <vendor-net> node address. "

B) "The <name> program in this package will change the hardware (MAC) "
   "address of each ethernet card in the system (by default) to match the "
   "corresponding <vendor-net> node address. "

Goes and looks it up... yes, it's dnet (vendor=DEC).  So presumably
it's A (and your intuition about plurals was right).  But looking at
those debconf templates there's what looks like some debconf note
abuse in there too, and various other bits and pieces in need of
review...
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package