On Mar 16, 2010, at 12:24 PM, Noirin Shirley wrote: > 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.
No, they can work out the difference (assuming they ever need to) by looking at the context. > 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 Yes, both Joshua Slive and Ken Coar would (very rarely) capitalize the HTTP for no apparent reason, as would various denizens of other projects (NCSA HTTPd post-1.5, kHTTPd, OmniHTTPd, etc.). That doesn't make it our product name. A patch to make everything consistently wrong is not an improvement over being inconsistently wrong in our docs. ....Roy
