Feisty Herd 4, grammar error in dialog text

[soundray]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

The partitioner text at the bottom reads "Make sure to allocate space for a root partition ("/"), with a minimum size of 2 GB.". Grammatically correct would be "Be sure to...". Better yet, this text should say "You need to specify one partition for the root filesystem (mount point "/") with a minimum size of 2GB, and a swap partition of at least 256 MB".

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Can you provide a reference for your grammatical quibble? The existing text sounds fine to this native British English speaker.

[soundray (ubuntubug)]

Collins Concise Dictionary 4th ed. states that "make sure" "takes a clause as object", whereas "be sure" "takes a clause as object or an infinitive". The use of "make sure" with an infinitive does not conform with standard English usage. Note that I made a suggestion that eliminates all grammatical uncertainty and is much clearer.

And, if your goal is to improve the quality of the software, I suggest that you shouldn't alienate people who share that goal by arrogantly disparaging their suggestions, however unimportant the bug may seem.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Um, I wasn't being arrogant, nor did I disparage your suggestion. I simply said it sounded fine to me, noted that I was a native speaker in case that wasn't clear - since many of the people involved in the Ubuntu project are not - and asked for a reference in case this was one of the areas of grammar with which I was unfamiliar. (I don't regard the word "quibble" as disparaging, if that's what upset you; quibbling is an integral part of improving polish and general quality.) As a maintainer, an important part of maintaining quality is to ensure that I understand every change that's being made, rather than blindly accepting changes I don't understand. Furthermore, grammar sometimes varies between British and American English, and I had no idea which of those you spoke. There's no need to be sensitive about it.

I've changed the text to something similar to your second suggestion: "You need to specify a partition for the root file system (mount point "/") with a minimum size of 2 GB, and a swap partition of at least 256 MB. You may also set up other partitions if you wish." I've also changed a few other strings that used "Make sure to".

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

ubiquity (1.4.4) feisty; urgency=low

  * New partitioner:
    - Mark unusable free space as such (part of LP: #86202).
    - Add "Used" column (LP: #96126).
    - Pressing Enter in the create/edit dialog mount point entry box
      activates the OK button.
  * Old partitioner: Work around yet another hard-to-explain crash due to a
    partition being missing from /proc/partitions (LP: #73058).
  * KDE frontend:
    - Disable subsidiary autopartitioning options according to the primary
      selection (thanks to Thorbjørn Tux for prompting me with suggestions;
      LP: #85980).
    - Guard against on_partition_list_*_activate being called with no
      partition selected (LP: #95429).
  * Issue a debugging message any time a process exits, not just when it
    exits non-zero.
  * Disable migration-assistant if using the old partitioner: it crashes and
    is probably too much trouble to fix.
  * Avoid crashing in certain progressposition methods if no progress bar is
    running (LP: #51077).
  * Return to partitioning if you back up from partman-commit (LP: #78930).
  * Adjust ubiquity/text/partition_help, ubiquity/text/finished_label,
    debian/intro-alpha.txt, and debian/intro-beta.txt to avoid the
    grammatical error "make sure to" (LP: #86284).
  * Automatic update of included source packages: base-installer
    1.70ubuntu6, partman-auto 62ubuntu8, partman-partitioning 47ubuntu5,
    silo-installer 1.07ubuntu4.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:39:53 +0100