Re: How much is lintian an expert in english language ?

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

"Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:

>> That intransitive form of allow is almost always used
>> in combination with the preposition "for".

> But why then isn't the lintian check called
> "allows to allows for" or "allow is not the right word here" ?

In part technical limitations.  That part of Lintian can only suggest
corrections, and there isn't a special tag just for this.  So Lintian
suggests the simplest and most flexible idiomatic English replacement that
changes as few words as possible, which is "allows one to" (making it
transitive).

It's probably more accurate to say that this is clunky phrasing in
English, and there's probably a much more direct way of rephrasing the
same sentence.  But Lintian isn't very good at suggesting such things.

In most cases where I've seen someone use this construction, it would have
been better to just drop all those words.

For example, to pick the first change in your proposed diff (for those who
didn't see the diff, I'm looking at a whole sentence in upstream
documentation), instead of:

    A permissive mode depicted by option -tao which needs no predicted
    track size and allows to make use of eventual multi-session
    capabilities.

I would say something like:

    Permissive mode, set with the -tao option.  This mode does not require
    track size and can use eventual multi-session capabilities.

(Not 100% sure whether "eventual" is a term of art here, or is intended to
have the English meaning of something that isn't implemented yet but may
appear later.  If the latter, I'd probably rephrase this more, since that
isn't very clear.)

Note that most of what I did was delete words.  Both native and non-native
speakers, on first draft, often add far more words than are required.  A
lot of editing in English involves deleting words that don't add to the
meaning of the sentence.  In this case, the whole "allows to make use of"
phrase just became "can use".

I have great sympathy for people trying to write documentation in a
non-native language!  It's so hard to get subtleties of meaning and
phrasing right.  For example, "depicted by" is subtlely off here in ways
that are a bit hard to explain.  A depiction of something is an image or
representation of it.  For example, one would say that a photograph of me
"depicts me" or (a more common usage) "depicts a Debian developer," since
you often use "depict" to describe a specific image of some general
concept.  You therefore wouldn't say that a command-line option "depicts"
a mode, because the command-line option does not, itself, form a
representation of that mode.  Rather, the command-line option chooses,
selects, or enables that mode.  Here, I looked for the shortest and
simplest word I could find and went with "set."

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>