What's the easiest and/or simplest part of Linux Kernel?

[James Kuyper]

On 08/29/2013 02:43 PM, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
....

You both miss the most obvious: inserting Chinese text in a message
to an English newsgroup is a bug.

Is there an explicit prescription anywhere that this is an English
newsgroup? That does seem to be the convention, and I've felt a little
annoyed on those rare occasions when a conversation has been carried on
here in other languages, but is there any actual rule violated by such
conversations?

usenet itself is international. The Chinese text occurred only in a line
that was created automatically by his newsreader. I'm not sure how to
disable it, or even if it can be disabled (we are talking about Google
Groups, after all - but I'm not even sure how to control that behavior
in my own newsreader, Thunderbird). Assuming that it can be disabled,
are you seriously suggesting that he should do so every time he switches
from a Chinese language newsgroup to an English one? If he is a native
speaker of Chinese with a knowledge of English sufficient to justify
posting to this newsgroup, which seems to be the case, he's likely to
perform such switching pretty frequently.

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I
shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures,
and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious." --Eric
S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This quote is actually from (or perhaps paraphrased from) /The
Mythical Man-Month/, by Fred Brooks.

I was aware of the original quote and deliberately chose Raymond's
because the terminology is more modern; if I had quoted Brooks, I
doubt that [OP] would have understood the relevance of flowcharts
and tables to his question.

Brooks and MMM still deserve the credit. If you think the quote
needs paraphrasing for contemporary usage, paraphrase it yourself.
Attributing Eric Raymond is misleading.

Eric Raymond is who said what I quoted, so he is the proper person to
attribute. To attribute it to Brooks would be untrue. To claim that
_I_ had paraphrased Brooks, when I was actually quoting Raymond, would
be plagiarism.

The problem with that idea is no one will think to look, and people
will come away with the wrong impression.

I read TMMM not because someone told me to but because it was cited in
conversation. Ditto for many other important books, including TCatB. I
was returning the favor by citing it myself.

I looked it up only because I recognized the quote as being from
Mythical Man-Month.

.... except it's not. The quote is actually from TCatB, so the proper
attribution should have corrected your faulty memory. You're welcome.

S

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

You both miss the most obvious: inserting Chinese text in a message
to an English newsgroup is a bug.

Usenet is not English-only, so being able to use non-ASCII characters is
a feature, not a bug. I see folks posting in other languages all the
time, yet nobody complains if it uses Latin characters. Why are
non-Latin characters to be singled out for abuse? Does he not have a
right to use his real name, for instance, rather than a transliterated
approximation?

And that was not even the reason for my complaint; the double line
spacing bug was.

You quoted a bunch of replacement characters and asked him to "fix" his
newsreader, even though it was yours that wasn't working correctly.

You said nothing about the line spacing bug, or various other quoting
bugs, which Google Groups seems to have in _every_ language.

S

 

[Keith Thompson]

On 08/29/2013 02:43 PM, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
...

Is there an explicit prescription anywhere that this is an English
newsgroup? That does seem to be the convention, and I've felt a little
annoyed on those rare occasions when a conversation has been carried on
here in other languages, but is there any actual rule violated by such
conversations?

There are few if any explicit rules here, just conventions (one of which
is that discussions occur in English).

An occasional Chinese (or French, or German) character in an attribution
line doesn't bother me -- and seems not to be what was being complained
about anyway.

[...]

 

[Keith Thompson]

On 27-Aug-13 00:07, Tim Rentsch wrote:
"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I
shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures,
and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious." --Eric
S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This quote is actually from (or perhaps paraphrased from) /The
Mythical Man-Month/, by Fred Brooks.

I was aware of the original quote and deliberately chose Raymond's
because the terminology is more modern; if I had quoted Brooks, I
doubt that [OP] would have understood the relevance of flowcharts
and tables to his question.

Brooks and MMM still deserve the credit. If you think the quote
needs paraphrasing for contemporary usage, paraphrase it yourself.
Attributing Eric Raymond is misleading.

Eric Raymond is who said what I quoted, so he is the proper person to
attribute. To attribute it to Brooks would be untrue. To claim that
_I_ had paraphrased Brooks, when I was actually quoting Raymond, would
be plagiarism.

I probably would have cited it like this:

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I
shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures,
and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."
-- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
paraphrasing Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

The original Brooks quote:

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall
continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually
need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

may be unclear to a modern reader; Raymond's paraphrase probably
presents the concept more clearly, and I agree that quoting the
paraphrase was a good idea. Both deserve credit: Brooks for the
idea, Raymond for the paraphrase.

[...]

 

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

(snip)

Usenet is not English-only, so being able to use non-ASCII characters is
a feature, not a bug. I see folks posting in other languages all the
time, yet nobody complains if it uses Latin characters. Why are
non-Latin characters to be singled out for abuse? Does he not have a
right to use his real name, for instance, rather than a transliterated
approximation?

I suspect that if I post in EBCDIC I won't get many useful replies,
assuming it gets through the posting host.

-- glen

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

Usenet is not English-only, so being able to use non-ASCII characters is
a feature, not a bug. I see folks posting in other languages all the
time, yet nobody complains if it uses Latin characters. Why are
non-Latin characters to be singled out for abuse?

I suppose I will have to be clearer ...

It's not about the character set, it's about the attribution line not
being readable, assuming we agree the lingua franca here is English.

It's the same bug as Swedish versions of newsreaders prepending "SV:"
to the subject line instead of "Re:", or French ones using "a ecrit"
instead of "wrote": assuming the sender's local preferred settings
should affect what is seen by the recipients.

Does he not have a
right to use his real name, for instance, rather than a transliterated
approximation?

He does (although it will affect the usefulness of his message).

You quoted a bunch of replacement characters and asked him to "fix" his
newsreader, even though it was yours that wasn't working correctly.

You said nothing about the line spacing bug, or various other quoting
bugs

I would have, if I had expected it to turn into a tedious discussion.
It was meant as a very quickly typed indication that I found the
posting hard to read and reply to, and I had edited away the line
spacing bugs so I couldn't attach the complaint there.

which Google Groups seems to have in _every_ language.

You seem to be reading some kind of disrespect to Chinese people or
culture or character sets in particlar into my message. Just to be
clear: I didn't intend such a thing. It was just the same old Google
Groups bugs which annoyed me -- again.

/Jorgen

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

I was aware of the original quote and deliberately chose
Raymond's because the terminology is more modern; if I had
quoted Brooks, I doubt that [OP] would have understood the
relevance of flowcharts and tables to his question.

Brooks and MMM still deserve the credit. If you think the quote
needs paraphrasing for contemporary usage, paraphrase it
yourself. Attributing Eric Raymond is misleading.

Eric Raymond is who said what I quoted, so he is the proper person
to attribute. To attribute it to Brooks would be untrue. To claim
that _I_ had paraphrased Brooks, when I was actually quoting
Raymond, would be plagiarism.

I probably would have cited it like this:

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I
shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures,
and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."
-- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
paraphrasing Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

I thought about doing that, and I would have for a formal paper, but
this is Usenet; I figured anyone who cared either would already know
both quotes or would Google it to learn more. It's not like TCatB is an
obscure source among programmers.

... Both deserve credit: Brooks for the idea, Raymond for the
paraphrase.

Is credit not transitive? i.e. I credited Raymond, Raymond credited
Brooks, ergo I credited Brooks?

S

 

[James Kuyper]

On 08/29/2013 07:01 PM, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
....

It's not about the character set, it's about the attribution line not
being readable, assuming we agree the lingua franca here is English.

I'd say that's the key point of disagreement. As long as the name of
author is readable (which it was), I don't see any point in mandating
the use of English in that context. Even the components of the date and
time were readable (though the fact that "3" meant "3 PM" wasn't
obvious). More importantly, I don't know of any one who has issued such
a mandate, nor anyone with the authority to do so.

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

I suppose I will have to be clearer ...

It's not about the character set, it's about the attribution line
not being readable, assuming we agree the lingua franca here is
English.

Vous avez dit "lingua franca", alors pourquoi ne parlez-vous en français?*

There's no charter saying this is an English-only group, and folks do
post in other languages from time to time. It's a convention at best,
and his attribution line was easy enough to parse anyway because they
all have roughly the same content, regardless of what language they're
in. The biggest problem was your newsreader (slrn?) not decoding the
characters as intended or not properly encoding your response quoting
them. UTF-8 just passed 20 years old; this is not new technology.

It's the same bug as Swedish versions of newsreaders prepending
"SV:" to the subject line instead of "Re:", or French ones using "a
ecrit" instead of "wrote": assuming the sender's local preferred
settings should affect what is seen by the recipients.

That is an unfortunate side effect of using plain text rather than a
structured document format like HTML. However, Usenet consensus seems
to be that HTML messages are a Bad Thing(tm), so unless you stick to
groups without participants with other native languages, you're going to
run into this over and over.

He does (although it will affect the usefulness of his message).

I don't see how using his real name affects the usefulness of his
message at all. Even if your keyboard doesn't allow you to (easily)
type it, you should still be able to cut and paste it if needed. It's
not like the message body itself was in Chinese, which would have
severely limited his audience.

I would have, if I had expected it to turn into a tedious
discussion. It was meant as a very quickly typed indication that I
found the posting hard to read and reply to, and I had edited away
the line spacing bugs so I couldn't attach the complaint there.

Ah. For future reference, when telling someone to fix something, it's
helpful to specify what you think is broken.

You seem to be reading some kind of disrespect to Chinese people or
culture or character sets in particlar into my message. Just to be
clear: I didn't intend such a thing.

I didn't think you had a problem with Chinese specifically, but I run
into broken apps or web sites every day that handle non-English Latin
characters in single-byte encodings fine but break down when facing
non-Latin characters or even non-English Latin characters in multi- byte
encodings. That's a pet peeve of mine.

It was just the same old Google Groups bugs which annoyed me --
again.

I think Google Groups annoys pretty much everyone on Usenet who does not
use it themselves. I've been tempted to killfile the entire mess, but
many of the problems only crop up in replies to GG posts, which are
often worth reading, not the GG posts themselves.

S

* "You said 'lingua franca', so why do you not speak in French?"

 

[Keith Thompson]

On 29-Aug-13 12:06, Tim Rentsch wrote:
I was aware of the original quote and deliberately chose
Raymond's because the terminology is more modern; if I had
quoted Brooks, I doubt that [OP] would have understood the
relevance of flowcharts and tables to his question.

Brooks and MMM still deserve the credit. If you think the quote
needs paraphrasing for contemporary usage, paraphrase it
yourself. Attributing Eric Raymond is misleading.

Eric Raymond is who said what I quoted, so he is the proper person
to attribute. To attribute it to Brooks would be untrue. To claim
that _I_ had paraphrased Brooks, when I was actually quoting
Raymond, would be plagiarism.

I probably would have cited it like this:

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I
shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures,
and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."
-- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
paraphrasing Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

I thought about doing that, and I would have for a formal paper, but
this is Usenet; I figured anyone who cared either would already know
both quotes or would Google it to learn more. It's not like TCatB is an
obscure source among programmers.

... Both deserve credit: Brooks for the idea, Raymond for the
paraphrase.

Is credit not transitive? i.e. I credited Raymond, Raymond credited
Brooks, ergo I credited Brooks?

No, it's not. You say that anyone who cared would Google it to learn
more, but someone who doesn't happen to be familiar with either
the original quote or with Eric Raymond's paraphrase would likely
have no particular reason to Google it. I was familiar with the
Brooks quote, and so I recognized the paraphrase for what it was.
I've probably read the Raymond paraphrase, but I didn't remember it.
If I hadn't seen either, I would have taken the paraphrase as a
clever statement by Raymond that stands on its own.

I don't think this is as big a deal as the length of this response makes
it look like I do; I'm replying to your apparent assertion that you
already provided sufficient attribution.

"Don't trust quotations you see on the Internet"
-- Abraham Lincoln, comp.std.c, 1732.

 

[James Kuyper]

....
... And that was not even the reason
for my complaint; the double line spacing bug was.

How in the world were we supposed to reach that conclusion? You didn't
say that's what the complaint was about, and there were no examples of
that bug in the quoted text preceding the complaint. You removed the
double spacing from the quoted text following the complaint.

 

[Eric Sosman]

How in the world were we supposed to reach that conclusion? You didn't
say that's what the complaint was about, and there were no examples of
that bug in the quoted text preceding the complaint. You removed the
double spacing from the quoted text following the complaint.

"That was the curious incident."
-- S. Holmes

 

[Phil Carmody]

Usenet is not English-only

"Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character set."

Yours slam-dunkingly,
Phil

 

[James Kuyper]

"Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character set."

This applies to attribution lines?

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

"Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII
character set."

That is true of NNTP itself, but that says nothing of the content of the
messages carried. Ditto for SMTP and HTTP.

In fact, all use the same standard (MIME) for transporting character
encodings other than ASCII, most commonly UTF-8. Millions (billions?)
use these protocols to communicate in languages other than English every
day.

S

 

[Keith Thompson]

"Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character set."

¿Really?

 

[Phil Carmody]

This applies to attribution lines?

To everyting.

Phil

 

[Phil Carmody]

¿Really?

Why not query the RFC that you've just violated yourself?

Phil

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Why not query the RFC that you've just violated yourself?

Violated? ¡Qué barbaridad!

Quotes from RFC 3977, "Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)":

On page 1:

"Obsoletes: 977"

On page 3:

"Although the protocol specification in this document is largely
compatible with the version specified in RFC 977 [RFC977], a number
of changes are summarised in Appendix D. In particular:

o the default character set is changed from US-ASCII [ANSI1986] to
UTF-8 [RFC3629] (note that US-ASCII is a subset of UTF-8);"

On page 5:

"The character set for all NNTP commands is UTF-8 [RFC3629]."