Bug#184507: 2.3.9.1 grammar
On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 11:55:52AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Firstly, this is not broad enough, saying that communicating
> to the user by hand encompoassed all possible means of communicating,
No, it's simply technically meaningless. To me, "by hand" implies,
"without the use of a computer" (as in, "I balance my checkbook by
hand").
> not just stdio.
Well, I'm sorry - obviously I don't know what "by hand" is supposed to
mean. I tried to work it out by inference - all the packages I know
of that don't use debconf use stdio - but apparently I was wrong. And
I'm a native English speaker and familiar with the idiom. Imagine how
non-native English speakers must feel! (Not to mention the poor
translators.)
Why don't you tell me what it *does* mean (or what you think it's
supposed to mean), and I'll see if I can come up with some decent
wording for that.
Or, since it *is* deprecated, and since all *existing* packages use
stdio, we could just say "stdio" like I did. Surely the utter
flexibility of an option we're trying to remove isn't crucial?
> Secondly, the debconf language has become turgid,
> and in an effort to be absolutely and incontrovertibly unambiguous
> is beginning to verge on being incomprehensible.
Yes, I agree completely. I was more focused on the "by hand" part,
which has been bugging me for ages (thanks to the original reporter
for finally bringing it up on the list), but the rest of that section
is long overdue for some cleanup too.
> Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if necessary.
> Prompting may be accomplished by hand (deprecated), or by
> communicating through a program which conforms to the Debian
> Configuration management specification, version 2 or higher (debconf,
> for example).
Except for the continued presence of the semantically null "by hand",
I like it.
cheers
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
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