Hello Alan,
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 5:35 AM, <pacman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> According to man2/lseek.2,
>
> This document's use of whence is incorrect English, but maintained for
> historical reasons.
>
> What is the grammatical objection?
It's a mystery to me too.
> From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
> whence
> adv 1: from what place, source, or cause
>
> Wiktionary:
> [edit] Adverb
> whence (not comparable)
> 1. From where; from which place or source.
>
> lseek's second parameter is a distance to be traveled, and the third
> parameter chooses the starting point from which that distance is measured.
> How is that not a "whence"?
Quite.
> Looking at some man page archives, I found that the accusation of incorrect
> English goes back to before 4.4BSD. It survives not just in the
> linux-man-pages but also in recent versions of {Net,Open,Free}BSD. The name
> "whence" for this parameter goes back at least to V7.
>
> Of all the people who have read this page over the years, am I the only one
> wondering... what's this about? Who decided that "whence" was incorrect and
> put that note in the man page? Was there ever anything wrong, or do we have
> someone's 20-year-old unresearched pet peeve lingering in the man pages?
It beats me. But I agree with you and I've removed that sentence from
man-pages-3.34.
Thanks also to Reuben, who made a similar recent report.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/
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