On 11/09/2017 10:12, Richard Melville wrote:
On 9 September 2017 at 16:48, Roger Koehler <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 9:43 AM, Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Richard Melville wrote:
>>
>> On the web page
>>
>>
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter01/whatsnew.html
<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter01/whatsnew.html>
>> there are further inconsistencies. The following packages:
d-bus, expat,
>> gperf, and tcl-core all have a hyphen between the package name
and the
>> version, e.g. "Expat-2.2.3", as one would expect. None of the other
>> packages listed does, e.g. "File 5.31". It may appear to some to
be an
>> unimportant issue, but it looks sloppy.
>
> Seems a little picky, but nevertheless I've updated my sandbox to
add dashes
> to all the packages. We will not update the stable book, but the
dashes
> will appear in the -dev book starting with the next commit.
Thanks Bruce, I think that's a big improvement.
Consistency is good.
I like the dashes because when I build manually following the book, I
like to copy and paste the package name to use as the filename of my
log file. It would be nice to not have to add the dashes manually
(easier to work with than spaces in filenames).
As Roger says, "consistency is good", so, at the risk of appearing to
increase your workload further Bruce, could I again return to the point
that this web page: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/news.html has
recently diverted from the long-running standard of, for example, "LFS
7.9 Stable Release to one of "LFS Stable Version 7.10 Release". The
original standard reads so much better than the recently adopted
change. Surely it is better to keep the version number adjacent to
"LFS" than it is to shuffle it close to the end of the line.
Here's another apparently random change. The Development LFS Systemd
book:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/systemd/chapter06/dbus.html
shows "D-Bus-1.10.22",
whereas the latest BLFS book
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/dbus.html shows
"dbus-1.10.22". Personally, I prefer the latter style of lower case as
it's consistent with the package download URL of
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-1.10.22.tar.gz
<http://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-1.10.22.tar.gz>.
However, my point is that there is no consistency. These may seem like
very minor points, but surely, in computing consistency is very important.
Normally, all our titles should use "Title Case". Now the question is what
package names are. For example, SWIG is an acronym (for Simplified Wrapper
and Interface Generator), so should be written all caps. So is GCC (Gnu
Compiler Collection). But what about NASM (Netwide Assembler) or yasm, for
example? We usually rely on upstream way of writing. So we have NASM, and
yasm (but it should be Yasm in titles and at the beginning of a sentence).
Upstream way of writing dbus is D-Bus. But users (at least me, but I guess
others too) looking for it in the table of contents, do not know upstream
way, and look for dbus. They won't find it, even if case matching is
relaxed...
So, yes, consistency is good, but consistency in natural language is not
always possible. And the books are natural language, not programming
language. I can tell you as one of the developer of jhalfs ;-)
Anyway, what should we do in this case:
- at least LFS and BLFS should be consistent. So the titles should be the
same for the same package in both books.
- If we take our convention of Title Case, and want to have an easily
searchable title, this should be Dbus
- If we prefer upstream usage, this should be D-Bus
FWIW, D-Bus was changed to dbus in BLFS on November 27th, 2016, by Bruce...
Pierre
