Hi, Alex & all, On Tue, Jun 07, 2022 at 11:08:42AM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > Hi, Peter and Branden! > > On 6/6/22 23:33, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > [CC list trimmed since this is solely about English and *roff] > > > > At 2022-06-06T15:40:08-0400, Peter Xu wrote: > > > > I think the patch below would improve a little bit the wording (and > > > > newlines). I still have a bit of trouble understanding "When a > > > > kernel-originated fault was triggered on the registered range with > > > > this userfaultfd". Did you maybe mean "range registered" instead of > > > > "registered range"? > > > > > > Since I'm not a native speaker I don't immediately see the difference > > > between the two. > > > > Short answer: I think your existing wording is acceptable. > > > > As a native speaker (but not a trained linguist) I think I can speak to > > the subject: both forms are equivalent in this application. In standard > > English, adjectives usually precede the nouns they modify. > [...] > > But in this case, > > "When a kernel-originated fault was triggered on the registered range with > this userfaultfd" > > "registered" is not acting as an adjective, but as a verb. I wanted to use it as an adjective, but after you questioned this one I'm not sure any more on my English school knowledges. :) > Maybe Peter was confused by that; I didn't consider that option. I'm > actually surprised that you were, Branden, but I guess it was just a > neuron going crazy, as mine with \c the other day :p > > > > > > > It's always challenging for me to grasp how you prefer the newlines > > > are made, but anyway below changes looks good to me. > > Sorry, Peter. I'll take that into account, and try to help as much as I > can. You're greatly helpful start from the beginning, and I just hope you can still bare with me. :-) > Apart from what Branden has already added to this thread, the > following man-pages commit has some more details, quoted from B. W. > Kernighan, and may help you understand what I want: > > <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/man7/man-pages.7?h=alx/main&id=6ff6f43d68164f99a8c3fb66f4525d145571310c> > > I have a long-standing discussion with Branden regarding how much should I > push for semantic newlines. The origin of using semantic newlines is only > to simplify diffs (and it does that very well), but for some reason, my > brain reads the text better too when organized that way, as opposed to > normal prose-like text flow. There I seem to disagree with Branden, who > prefers to read my emails as if they were a book. Maybe I need semantic > newlines to understand the text better, because there are a lot of technical > terms that I don't know, and having less load on my brain (because I don't > need to calculate phrase boundaries) makes it easier; it's especially useful > when text is under development, where it may have mistakes that make it even > more difficult to read. > > But, just do what you can. I'll try to do the rest, and ask you if I don't > understand something. Yes IMHO that'll be the best way to go with the rest of the community too, because afaict not all community developers will be able to quickly get used to the rules on man page repository - you're working with a bunch of people using in most cases C compilers which has a much looser syntax! It'll be great if you could help tune the bits after the content being contributed by others as long as the modified version has the correct meanings. Not sure whether it'll have scaling problem but hopefully the man pages won't be updated drastically so it won't overload you so easily. Thanks again for all the helps, -- Peter Xu
