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Exceptions and rulesExceptions and rulesPosted Oct 29, 2012 16:49 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Exceptions and rules by rfunk Parent article: Thoughts on the ext4 panic
I was responding to nix's interpretation above. You're correct about the original meaning, of course. But I disagree that the usage here fits the original meaning. It does. We had a rule: ext4 is rock-solid and is robust no matter what you throw on it (unless you are doing something totally insane like using broken RAID controller). Now we have an exception: if you use ext4 with non-default mount option journal_checksum then you may expect data corruption in some rare cases. The fact that such a small exception raised such a ruckus can be used as a support for the original rule (after all if the file system corrupts data all the time then yet-another-bug in it will hardly be a newsworthy material). Even if I accept that it does, however, just the fact the the phrase is widely misunderstood and misused should consign it to the dustbin; if most people don't understand it correctly, communication isn't happening. Most people on this planet don't understand English. Should we stop using it and close LWN?
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Exceptions and rules Posted Oct 29, 2012 18:40 UTC (Mon) by randomguy3 (subscriber, #71063) [Link] See Wikipedia's article on the phrase, which enumerates 5 usages (from most correct to least correct) from Fowler's Modern English Usage. I think that the article's usage would fit in number 3 (loose rhetorical): the use of the phrase is to draw attention to the fact that something is uncommon. The existence of the bug does not imply that bugs are uncommon. Nor is the ruckus itself an exception from anything.Most people on this planet don't understand English. Should we stop using it and close LWN?"Most people on the planet" is irrelevant. "Most people who read LWN" is much more relevant, and "tech-savvy English speakers" is a good approximation of that.
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