From owner-freebsd-doc Wed Jan 24 14:26:52 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 46C8937B400; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 14:26:33 -0800 (PST) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id CB1506AB74; Thu, 25 Jan 2001 08:56:30 +1030 (CST) Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 08:56:30 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: Nik Clayton Cc: Ben Smithurst , Alexey Zelkin , Ruslan Ermilov , Sheldon Hearn , Mike Pritchard , doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: mdoc(7) questionnaire (was: Re: trailing dot in .Nd) Message-ID: <20010125085630.F37060@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20010122175432.A31943@sunbay.com> <20010122185304.B25101@comp.leeds.ac.uk> <20010123101530.A98532@sunbay.com> <20010123164227.A4978@ark.cris.net> <20010123162819.C29189@comp.leeds.ac.uk> <20010123224241.A1974@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010123224241.A1974@canyon.nothing-going-on.org>; from nik@freebsd.org on Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 10:42:41PM +0000 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tuesday, 23 January 2001 at 22:42:41 +0000, Nik Clayton wrote: > I've explicitly pulled Greg Lehey in to this. > > On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 04:28:19PM +0000, Ben Smithurst wrote: >> Alexey Zelkin wrote: >> >>>> 2. Should we consistently change all occurrences of ``.Nm Foo'' to >>>> ``.Nm foo'' where the command name is actually ``foo''? (YES, NO) >>> >>> Yes, of course, but it just should be changed to construction like >>> >>> The command/utility/etc >>> .Nm >> >> I disagree with this, putting "the ... command" around something is just >> unnecessary IMO. But perhaps grammatical correctness means more to some >> people than it does to me. :-) This is punctuation, not grammar. > FWIW, that's my opinion as well. However, out of the depths of my > somewhat rusty memory I think I recall Greg Lehey having some compelling > reasons for doing the opposite (i.e., what Alexey is suggesting). I > can't for the life of me remember what they were though, hence the cc:, > in the hope that Greg can remind us. Hmm. I can't recall a compelling reason. Obviously a sentence starting with a lower-case letter looks funny, so if we can avoid it, we should. I've just checked vinum(8), and I find a number of sequences like this: Exit the .Nm program when running in interactive mode. Terminate access to the objects, or stop .Nm if no parameters are specified. On the other hand, I also have: .Sh DESCRIPTION .Nm is a utility program to communicate with the \fBVinum\fP\| logical volume manager. This rather confirms my recollection that I'd like to avoid putting lower-case letters at the beginning of a sentence, but that I'd do it rather than bloat the style. I think that's what you're saying as well. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message