Nitpicking grammar, layout, abreviations

[gerard@…]

From: "Alex Groenewoud" To: "Mark Hymers" <markh@…> Subject: uppercase and lowercase Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 22:24:27 +0100

Hello Mark The following very minor editorial issues I have raked together in the past days. They are so minor I think it's best to leave them to a day you have plenty of energy. <extreme nit-picking mode> In chapter 3 most op the headers are spelled as the packages are, except the following five: Diff Utils, File Utils, Text Utils, Find Utils (twice), and Util Linux. (Compare this to Binutils, Sh-utils, and Modutils.) (This also goes for the headers in the official download locations in appendix A.) Also in chapter 3, file.xml contains a newline too many, resulting in an extra blank line in the list. And the 1217 KB of Fileutils is out style with a missing comma: 1,217. (Although I would prefer to see the sizes in more human-readable form. In this case: 1.2 MB.) But what drew my attention in the first place: I think KB should be replaced with kB. The abbreviation for 'kilo' is 'k', not 'K'. I know, kilo here is 1024, not 1000, but the something similar goes for the 'M' of mega, and no one uses a super-big or double 'M' to mark that difference. In chapter 6, in the section on debugging symbols, the numbers are glued to the letters MB and kB. To be consistent a space is in order here. And Bash should be spelled there in lowercase, I think. Almost nowhere in the book quotes are used to bracket program names in plain text, but suddenly in chapter5/diffutils-exp.xml there is a paragraph that uses them. (It makes the words sound strangely ironic.) In the book 'ed is consistently used to form a past participle from a command name, except in this new section: chapter5/installasuser.xml: chrooted --> chroot'ed (twice) BTW, why does appendix A contain a separate section on chroot? chapter6/glibc-inst.xml: any way than this --> any other way than this book suggests it --> book suggests chapter6/sysvinit-inst.xml: This implies --> This seems to imply which isn't --> but this isn't you change --> you can change The plain xmls in chapters 5 and 6 spell the name of a package with an initial uppercase letter, whereas the desc.xmls (in appendix A) spell it with an initial lowercase. For example: "Installing Bash" and "Contents of bash". In most of the inst.xmls the names of packages are consistently spelled with an uppercase initial. But not in chapter 5 fileutils and chapter 6 psmisc. The spelling of glibc in the whole of chapters 5 and 6 is rather erratic: here with, there without initial capital. </extreme nit-picking mode> Cheers! Alex

[gerard@…]

Two items:

+ "seperate" should be

"separate" (in the USA, anyway).

+ I found the 1st paragraph difficult to parse and suggest

replacing the last sentence:

Binutils is best left alone, so we recommend you unsetting CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and other such variables/settings that would change the default optimization that it comes with.

with:

Binutils is best left alone. Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting or modifying them when building binutils. You have been warned.

This is the first instance of discussing CFLAGS in the running text, so it seems important to be very clear what the reader is encountering here. You might want to include a forward link to the discussion of optimization first mentioned in Chapter 6: Introduction, as well as a suggestion to spend some time looking through the gcc info if you have no idea what's being discussed.

[gerard@…]

Fixed most of it, except the "kB" thing and the human readable format.