Re: How much is lintian an expert in english language ?
"Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> writes:
> It seems all to hang at Justin B Rye's statement
> "Most English transitive verbs are pretty easygoing about
> being turned into intransitives like this,
> "to allow" is one of the exceptions"
> Sez who ?
> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allow
> has 5 items of "transitive verb" and 2 of "intransitive verb".
The intransitive meanings of allow don't mean the same thing. That's the
"people should allow for personal differences" meaning of allow, which
means "tolerate" or "make allowances for" or "design for." You don't want
that meaning when you're trying to say that a program allows someone to do
a specific thing. That intransitive form of allow is almost always used
in combination with the preposition "for".
It *is* possible to have a legitimate and grammatical use of the phrase
"to allow" by saying something like "This program is designed to allow for
a variety of uses," but it's not as common of phrasing for a package
description, and it's usually a pretty indirect and unusual way of
phrasing things.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: