[systemd-devel] [PATCH] Reword sentences that contain psuedo-English "resp."

Andrew Eikum aeikum at codeweavers.com
Mon Oct 15 11:59:12 PDT 2012


As you likely know, Arch Linux is in the process of moving to systemd.
So I was reading through the various systemd docs and quickly became
baffled by this new abbreviation "resp.", which I've never seen before
in my English-mother-tongue life.

Some quick Googling turned up a reference:
<http://www.transblawg.eu/index.php?/archives/870-Resp.-and-other-non-existent-English-wordsNicht-existente-englische-Woerter.html>

I guess it's a literal translation of the German "Beziehungsweise", but
English doesn't work the same way. The word "respectively" is used
exclusively to provide an ordering connection between two lists. E.g.
"the prefixes k, M, and G refer to kilo-, mega-, and giga-,
respectively." It is also never abbreviated to "resp." So the sentence
"Sets the default output resp. error output for all services and
sockets" makes no sense to a natural English speaker.

This patch removes all instances of "resp." in the man pages and
replaces them with sentences which are much more clear and, hopefully,
grammatically valid. In almost all instances, it was simply replacing
"resp." with "or," which the original author (Lennart?) could probably
just do in the future.

The only other instances of "resp." are in the src/ subtree, which I
don't feel privileged to correct.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Eikum <aeikum at codeweavers.com>

---

> Does that make sense to you?

Yep, sounds good. I went through the patch and was more careful about
wording, to be sure the intent gets across. In one or two cases, I
just split out the two "tenses" entirely. Please give it a careful
once-over, but I think this should be good to go.

Thanks,
Andrew

 man/daemon.xml                               |  2 +-
 man/journalctl.xml                           | 14 +++----
 man/os-release.xml                           |  4 +-
 man/sd-daemon.xml                            |  2 +-
 man/sd-readahead.xml                         |  2 +-
 man/sd_booted.xml                            |  2 +-
 man/sd_is_fifo.xml                           |  2 +-
 man/sd_journal_next.xml                      |  4 +-
 man/sd_listen_fds.xml                        |  2 +-
 man/sd_notify.xml                            |  2 +-
 man/sd_readahead.xml                         |  2 +-
 man/systemd-ask-password-console.service.xml |  4 +-
 man/systemd-cat.xml                          |  2 +-
 man/systemd-cgtop.xml                        | 12 +++---
 man/systemd-inhibit.xml                      |  5 ++-
 man/systemd.exec.xml                         | 18 ++++-----
 man/systemd.journal-fields.xml               |  4 +-
 man/systemd.kill.xml                         |  2 +-
 man/systemd.service.xml                      |  4 +-
 man/systemd.socket.xml                       | 22 +++++-----
 man/systemd.swap.xml                         |  6 +--
 man/systemd.unit.xml                         | 20 +++++-----
 man/systemd.xml                              | 60 ++++++++++++++--------------
 23 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 97 deletions(-)

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