On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 5:22 PM [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> I know it's just one data point, but I thought the replies I got on this > Hacker News comment today were interesting. I can understand why he/she got > confused, and I wonder if there's anything MacPorts could do to make it > clearer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26678498 > As worded, the FAQ text "the ports you install will be compiled only for the architecture you're currently running on" implies (in the linguistic rather than logical sense) that the compilation happens after you request installation. The minimal patch would be to change the tense to "will *have been* compiled only for", but an even better rewording might be something like "…the ports' installed binaries will have been compiled for your computer's architecture…" to avoid putting the user's computer in any active role in that sentence and to make it clear we're talking about the binaries and not the compilation process per se. Perhaps "will contain machine code for" would be even more rigorous, but it might be less familiar. Of course, this sentence may not be the whole problem, but it's what I saw in that thread, it's likely *part* of the problem, and it made a good example of the kind of sentence that can be read differently by a reader not already familiar with the subjet.
