Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 15:21:03 +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: <20030606142103.GF49662@iconoplex.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20030606133528.GA9414@online.fr> References: <20030605165217.A388@online.fr> <3EE04920.7B8EA51F@mindspring.com> <20030606133528.GA9414@online.fr>
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On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 09:35:28AM -0400, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Most people even today only know windows, have only foggy ideas of > linux, and don't know BSD at all. I don't see why we should further > confuse them with talk of i386. And you think windows users, managers, office workers, etc. - they know what an IA-32 architecture is do they? But get confused when talking about i386? Impressive. Most of the office workers I've worked within in the past didn't know the difference between RAM and hard disk storage. Your office must have come along quite a way. If you know what IA-32 is, but don't know what i386 is, you're not somebody who should be reading the documentation that refers to the phrase "i386" without qualification of what it means. For example: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html makes it prefectly clear that an i386 is a PC. Where exactly do you perceive there being a problem? The MD of a local company is not likely to want to know how to re-build his kernel, so won't care whether we refer to i386 or ia32 - he just wants a box that works. Of course, if you really want to do it, I'm sure the doc project will take your patches and amend their policy to make it clear that the PCs will be referred to as IA-32 rather than i386. I just don't see the point, as it is likely to cause more ambiguity within the FBSD crowd than it would solve. -- Paul Robinson
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