docs/56729: [patch] artciles/pr-guidelines: explain meaning of MFC

Gary W. Swearingen underway at comcast.net
Fri Sep 12 19:01:37 UTC 2003


> should there be a certain "treshhold" like, only use freebsd specific
> terms or not trivial terms or should we include every term like "unix,
> ports, packages..."?

You're welcome to have the definitions from my old "jargon" web page:

       http://underway.home.comcast.net/jargon.html

It was mostly created while I was using Linux and only has a couple of
hundred entries, but some of them should be useful.  The definitions
were all composed by me and I waive my copyrights on them.


There should be a couple of notices in the glossary:

  1) Many definitions are incomplete and do not reflect all of the
  meanings used by the many FDP, manpage, and source code authors in
  every context.  They are only meant to be clues for the clueless.

  2) The FDP welcomes your contributions of new entries for this
  glossary, but must insist on this condition for all contributions:
  Contributors must own all copyrights for their contributions; even
  "fair use" copying must be avoided because one can't know what fair
  use copies from the same source have or will be contributed by
  others, which might be considered an unfair use.  Of course, not
  everything is copyrightable, so some judgement can be required.

A glossary could grow into an encyclopedia larger than the Handbook
(because of number of entries and size of entries) so I've included a
clue in notice "1" above that the definitions should be kept short.

Perhaps this would be a good time to discuss the issue of whether
standards and guidelines in FDP and other documentation should be
(better) documented.  Perhaps not -- there are good arguments for both
sides of the issue.  I'll not launch into the subject, except to note
that the issue should be addressed in the glossary, as I did in number
"1" above, documenting the status quo in which there is no recommended
or official jargon.



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