Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 12:07:05 +0100 From: Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Peeve: why "i386"? Message-ID: <20030609110705.GC34980@iconoplex.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20030606125417.A3489@online.fr> References: <20030606125417.A3489@online.fr>
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On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:54:17PM -0400, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Typical stupid red-herring answer one gets. I already said more than > once that I'm referring to things like release notes and press > information. OK, how many MDs do you know, that know what type of CPU they have in their machine at work? If you said to them "Is it an i386, an IA-32, an x86, a Pentium 4, or all of these?" they would say "Pentium 4" and only then if they are particularly interested in technology. The receptionist on the front desk might know it's something to do with Intel - "you know, the ones with that funny tune in the adverts" - but don't care what it is. Putting something in the release docs about IA-32 is going to confuse them as much as i386. The only way to help those people is to list every processor, everywhere (i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium MMX, Pentium 3, Celeron, Pentium 4, Cyrix... AMD....) and that's just silly. Geeks, on the other hand, know that (say) Intel P4s are IA-32, x86, i386 compatible processors and probably don't care much which one of them is used within the documents and source providing that they know it will work, and where there are issues (e.g. old Pentiums that need the F00F hack) the problems are documented specifically for that processor. In other words, the only people who care are probably Intel's marketing guys and pedants (a venn diagram of these two sectors can be provided on request) and absolutely nobody else at all, gives a damn. > Debian (to take a random example): > http://www.debian.org/ports/ > Intel x86 / IA-32 (``i386'')... > Linux was originally developed for the Intel 386 processors, hence the > short name. Debian supports all IA-32 processors, made by Intel, AMD, > Cyrix and other manufacturers. OK, so if at the start of the handbook and on the website (the first paragraph on the homepage) it is appears as: What is FreeBSD? FreeBSD is a modern operating system derived from the BSD UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is available for a wide range of platforms including desktop PCs (called by various people at different times the x86, i386, IA-32 and PC-98 architectures - we prefer to refer just to i386 even though we mean everything from the 386 onwards), and the DEC Alpha, IA-64 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is developed by a large team of individuals, mostly volunteers. You'd be happy with that? That one change does what your debian example does and means we don't have to change everything everywhere. > Now, which sounds better and more meaningful? And what exactly is the > harm with going the Debian way in this respect? You're asking chat@freebsd.org what is wrong with following Debian's example? Oh dear, oh dear.... -- Paul Robinson
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