On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 8:05 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. <wr...@rowe-clan.net> wrote: > On 3/16/2010 12:37 PM, Noirin Shirley wrote: >> >> In some places, we use httpd, but that leads to some horrible >> confusion between the product and the command. > > I guess I'm not seeing the disconnect. If a reader cannot parse httpd > as shorthand "the Apache HTTP Server program", then we have more serious > issues in helping them become a web server administrator.
The problem is that httpd is used as shorthand for "the Apache HTTP Server" *and* as a reference to a specific binary/process/command, and we assume that people can work out the difference, because, y'know, Bill knows the difference, and Roy does, so obviously, all the rest of us should too. If the command were, say, "apache2", then just using "Apache HTTP Server (httpd)" for the first mention, and "httpd" thereafter would be fine. Heck, even if we absolutely always used "apachectl", and never referred to the binary directly, we might be able to get something that worked, although there'd be a lot more rewriting of docs required. But when it's not always clear to people who've been working on the project for years whether a given instance of "httpd" refers to a single binary or a set of binaries, and config files, and sometimes other bits and pieces, how on earth do we expect users to be able to grok what we're talking about? And as for clueless lawyers, unless we've given one commit access, they're not the only ones using HTTPd either - cf http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/install.html Noirin
