Re: Changing Linux with GNU/Linux where necessary

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 7/19/06, Alexander Shopov <ash contact bg> wrote:
> There has been some discussion in the Bulgarian Gnome translation team
> that there are a lot of instances in the interface and documentation of
> GNOME, where an OS with a Linux kernel is referred simply as Linux and
> not GNU/Linux.
>
> While there are several OS-es which can host GNOME, a Linux-kernel
> containing one is surely heavily using GNU userland, utils and
> build-chain. Still - the main purpose of using the term "GNU/Linux" will
> surely be educational and promotional.
>
> Should such cases be reported in Bugzilla? Should we have a placeholder
> bug for these cases? Are there any objections to this and will this
> raise lots of emotional outbreaks?

I don't think it's a translation issue (if you translate "Linux" into
"GNU/Linux" or vice versa, then what you do isn't about translating,
and you aren't solving the real problem), and I don't think opening a
Bugzilla report would be productive at this point -- opening a
Bugzilla report at this stage without any strong policy backup
motivation of why it should be either way would just result in
everyone claiming that they're right. Clearly, this is more of a
terminology policy issue, and there needs to be some formal decision
on how it should be. When we finally have such a policy, we can start
adding bug reports in Bugzilla based on this policy, and hope that
developers adopt for the sake of consistency.

The GNOME Documentation Project is the authority for anything dealing
with English terminology in GNOME, even for the user interface. You
could probably start by bringing this up for discussion on the
gnome-doc-list and ask that a recommendation for this be added to the
word list section of the GNOME Documentation Style Guide¹.

¹ http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/


Thanks,
Christian