Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

On the other hand, we don't really want to require all our contributors to have perfect English. Some of them are Americans, after all.

-- Matt Mackall

If you document it, some idiot will depend on it.

-- Theo de Raadt

The arbitration process is still ongoing, hampered a bit by a full schedule on all parties' parts. There is a draft solution which is currently being discussed. Interested people can receive a copy of the draft solution, but it is private, confidential and anything but final.

We had an irc meeting last week during which the proposed solutions were discussed. It is however very difficult, not to say impossible to get agreement from both parties on almost any point (as would be expected).

-- Boudewijn Rempt on who gets "KOffice"

Our project has an earned reputation for being rejection-happy curmudgeons. This is something I heard more than once at MySQLConf, including from one student who chose to work on Drizzle instead of PostgreSQL for that reason. I think that we could stand to go out of our way to be helpful to first-time submitters.

That doesn't mean that we have to accept patches mangled by using an IDE designed for Java, and which lack test cases. However, we can be nice about it.

-- Josh Berkus

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Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 21, 2011 3:17 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

Funny factoid I learned from a British English professor in Japan: American English is closer to what was originally "proper English" than modern British English is.

I haven't verified his claims, but come on; he's a _professor_ from _England_, so it must be true!

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 15, 2011 19:23 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

Sorry, but that "factoid" is so oversimplified that it might as well be a lie.

While it is probably true that fewer words have changed in American English [en_US] than in (Cambridge Style) British English [en_GB], that is predominantly because of a single change in en_GB ("-ize/-ization" to "-ise/-isation") that has been applied to a lot of words. The number of different changes is much larger in en-US.

However, while it can be argued whether en_US or en_GB has changed the most from 17th Century English, the honour of changing the least must unquestionably belong to Oxford Style British English [en_GB-oed].

Note: Unlike en_US vs. en_GB, en_GB and en_GB-oed only differs in spelling, not in glossary, so you can't speak en_GB-oed. Most British write en_GB in their daily life, but virtually all international organizations, including the UN and EU, write all official documents in en_GB-oed, which is therefore sometimes called "formal" British English.

Also note that Canadian English [en_CA] spelling resembles en-GB-oed more closely than either en_US or en_GB, though en_CA glossary resembles en_US more closely than en_GB(-oed)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 21, 2011 11:16 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Yeah, only idiots read documentation. Intelligent people ignore it because they know it will be incomplete and/or out of date. Instead they read the source.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 21, 2011 18:31 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yes, because when I am at work and I have 30 minutes to solve a problem and move onto the next issue I found the most productive use of my time is to download the C code for random programs I am entirely unfamiliar with and reverse engineer the thoughts of the developers.

Then I can pray and hope that they never will change their minds for the next 15 years my 'quick fix' will be in production.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 21, 2011 18:59 UTC (Thu) by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085) [Link]

At least if you rely on something in the documentation and it breaks later, you have an excuse to complain upstream. Relying on the stability of an undocumented "feature" that you only found out about by reading the source, and then complaining when it breaks, is likely to get you laughed at, at best.

(Or was the parent comment tongue-in-cheek?)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 22, 2011 15:28 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

I would think so!!!

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 21, 2011 11:29 UTC (Thu) by rleigh (subscriber, #14622) [Link]

Having contributed a couple of patches to PostgreSQL as a first-
time contributor (psql shell fixes for troff/latex output and
UTF-8 unicode line drawing), I found the CommitFest model quite
professional. While my patches did need several rounds of
review and changes, this did result in a much better patch, and
while the process is a bit more involved than for other
projects, setting the bar a little higher is, I think, overall
a good thing for improving the quality of submissions.
Conversely, this may deter "casual" contributors somewhat given
that there are a few hoops to jump through, and that the process
can be slow if there's no one available to review your work,
given that the review is all done by volunteers as well.

Regards,
Roger

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 28, 2011 22:09 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

I actually prefer not to have any old random students code in my RDBMS.