On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 16:43 +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote: > Jason D. Clinton wrote: > > > > There are /very/ few mentions of Linux in our documentation. This is not > > worth fighting over. > > As I wrote above, I see the problem mainly in the user interface. And > it's not a fight because we love to fight, really. > > > File a bug in each module, if you want, and then let the module > > maintainer decide what to do. > > But some developers are more concerned about the practical advantages > of Free Software and don't care about freedom issues much. Such > developers will mark the bug WONTFIX or will close it, without a > policy, adopted by GDP.
I think you severely over-estimate my power. I can't force people to do anything. When the GDP makes terminology or other language recommendations, we are attempting to capture community or industry consensus. We typically try to find the words that are most familiar to people, because that's what helps our users most. The great thing about picking the most familiar words is that they're probably the least controversial ones. Occasionally, we have to make somewhat arbitrary choices between words that have equal popular usage. When this happens, people will generally follow our lead because they value consistency more than they like their choice of words. Basically, we can enforce our recommendations only because people don't care enough to go against them. The choice of "GNU" vs. "GNU/Linux" is not one of these cases. The people who say GNU/Linux are going to continue to say GNU/Linux, and the people who say Linux are likely going to continue to say Linux. A recommendation from the GDP won't change anything. My larger concern is where we're even using these words. Gnome runs on a lot of operating systems, many of which are not GNU systems. Our interfaces and documentation should avoid talking about the operating system whenever possible. Let's look at your examples: > The Linux version does not have this restriction. (GCompris) This looks valid. I don't know the surrounding context, but I assume it's warning of some restriction that only appears on some operating systems. I know, for example, that large parts of HAL currently only work on Linux. Yes, Linux. It's a matter of the kernel providing the hooks, and HAL knowing which hooks to look at. > GPM adds mouse support to text-based Linux applications such the > Midnight Commander. (system-tools-backends) > The most common archive format on UNIX and Linux systems is the tar > archive. (File Roller) > Linux mailers cannot do this task... (Evolution) > Video-Conferencing application for Linux and other Unices (Ekiga) The rest of these are just using Linux (and UNIX) to refer to the general mish-mash of similar operating systems we're all using. (GPM might actually be GNU- or Linux-specific, but I don't know.) I think what would be a worthwhile terminology recommendation is how to refer to the general class of systems. On the web, among geekdom, we've used stuff like *nix, and the in-crowd knows what the in-crowd is saying. But of course, our users aren't necessarily in the in-crowd. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
