Bug#390700: closed by Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> (Re: Bug#390700: 'man ssh-keysign' typos: "hostbased x 4)
On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 08:18:54 -0700
owner@bugs.debian.org (Debian Bug Tracking System) wrote:
> > -must be set-uid root if hostbased authentication is used.
> > +must be set-uid root if host based authentication is used.
> > .El
> > .Sh SEE ALSO
> > .Xr ssh 1 ,
>
> Thanks, but I'd rather not apply this, since "hostbased" is a
> technical term in the domain of SSH authentication methods.
Most of these crammed terms (e.g. "manpage" for "man page"), are
just ossified bad habits. I like 'em only as slang.
What's Google spew out?
hostbased 71,400 hits
"host based" 1,900,000 hits (mostly hyphenated)
I don't know if that's accurate though, as most of those "hostbased"
hits seem to be the web page names themselves, i.e.
".../adminguide/51/userauth-hostbased.html".
If it matters, 'ssh.com' and 'sun.com' favor "host-based". Suggested
compromise: insert a hyphen if not a space.
PS: I see a kind of minor world word war in these typos. As an
flat-accented American, I admire Noah Webster's moderate reforms, and am
dismayed by British spellings like "colour" in technical writing. Not
that I've anything against British English as such, just a prejudice
against its orthography as a retarding influence, not unlike their old
non-decimal cash; how surprising British technical men would be
sentimental about spelling. That's USA vs. UK.
Then there's the USA vs. Germany in all these crammed words, which are
probably proper German form. Some correctly argue that long words
allow mechanical spell checking to catch mixed words that would
otherwise be missed, but letting readers breathe is more important than
making a language assembly line ready.
The ancients didn't even use spaces. Spaces were to written phonetic
languages a bit like the zero was for written numbers. Wonder if
anyone has attempted to to compare languages to study if there's a
sweet spot for spaces/word-length ratios? An Anglo-centric hypothesis:
English hits this supposed sweet spot, partly accounting for its wide
utility. Or maybe there's more than one sweet spot, one for tech,
another for poetry, etc. Perhaps holding that tech spot would make us
too dangerously literal...
But we're all sometimes international barbarians to each other, and I'd
certainly never boycott all this excellent "foreign" software...
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