Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2002 14:48:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net> To: Chern Lee <chern@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Ceri Davies <ceri@FreeBSD.org>, Marc Fonvieille <blackend@FreeBSD.org>, <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: docs/38225: change "CDROM" to "CD-ROM" Message-ID: <20020807093534.M70872-100000@blues.jpj.net> In-Reply-To: <20020729050409.J20453-100000@www.freebsdmall.com>
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Chern Lee wrote: > Might I add, to confirm some of the earlier mention. > > Murray and I had decided to standardize on CDROM back in September of 2001 > or so. > > Reasons being: > 1. More occurances of CDROM over CD-ROM Occasionally, people call me "Kevin" or "Travis," but no matter how often they do so, those are not my names. > 2. History of FreeBSD with Walnut Creek CDROM Since that company no longer exists, and its successor no longer distributes FreeBSD, there will likely be very few new references to it. I've taken care not to change its name or domain to "Walnut Creek CD-ROM" or "cd-rom.com." We are able to have slight variations in names elsewhere, such as in the names of committers (Mike versus Mark versus Marc, for instance). > All of Walnut Creek's products were CDROMs, and still are CDROMs under > FreeBSD Mall. Suppose for a moment that "CD-ROM" is the correct name for such a disk. Also suppose that a user knows this. The less often this user sees "CDROM," the more favorable will be the user's impression, I would expect. If the user does not know or care, most likely the user would be oblivious to a situation where the distributor's labels and printed manuals differ from the contents of the disks. If "CD-ROM" is incorrect, then of course things should be left as they are. I took a look at FreeBSD Mall's Web pages, and did not see any products with "CDROM" in their names. Supposing that my proposal were accepted, I don't feel that it would cause much hardship for FreeBSD Mall, regardless of whether they choose to revise their labels and manuals. > I also believe there should be an agreement between the documentation and > the source. > > This comes to my attention first: > > dmesg | grep CDROM > acd0: CDROM <CRD-8482B> at ata1-master PIO4 The patch I submitted today would change this kind of textual output in several places. A caveat is that I haven't tested it. > But, digging deeper... CDROM is mentioned more than double the times > CD-ROM in the source. > > Unfortunately, CDROM is often used over CD-ROM in function names, macros, > etc. There were about 170 of these cases. The fact that the "-" would be treated as subtraction seemed like a compelling reason to leave those alone. > After removing incidents from src/contrib files and release notes: > > CDROM ~185 > CD-ROM ~250 > > CD-ROM is obviously more abundant throughout the source tree -- in > "strings", comments, non-code files, etc. So, this would be a leading > argument for a change. > > More importantly, however, CDROM is the word of choice in Sysinstall and > other more noticable FreeBSD locations. In my second patch, I propose to change the sysinstall display. I haven't tested it yet. > FreeBSD is marketed on 'CDROM' by most (if not all) of the FreeBSD > vendors, including what is resold in computer superstores such as Fry's > and CompUSA. > > IMHO, we should leave it as it is. > > Just my 2 cents. > > - chern -- Trevor Johnson To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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