[gpm] Re: offtopic: sleep nomenclature

[Peter Jones <pjones redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 14:05 +1000, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> On Friday 05 May 2006 07:43, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > My views on the Suspend / Sleep / Hibernate / Standby / SuspendToX
> > naming problems: http://live.gnome.org/GnomePowerManager/SleepNames
> >
> > Comments appreciated, but I don't want this to turn into a cross-list
> > flame-fest. :-)
> 
> Ok. Silly comments first...
> 
> "Awww! :) No comment on silly names like "swsusp"?"
> 
> "Spose I'd better rename my patch to hibernate2 then."
> 
> And then more seriously, I like the idea of choosing names that the user will 
> understand, and appreciate the suspend-to-disk point, particularly when we're 
> working towards suspending to other things (flash, usb, network).
> 
> The second set doesn't seem right. The opposite of hibernate is wake (the bear 
> doesn't get frozen),

Wake is the opposite of sleep, not hibernate.  The bear may not
precisely freeze (though the cold-blooded animals do), but it doesn't
wake until the rest of the local ecosystem is literally thawing.

Then again, "thaw" also applies to e.g. a bears fur, and in many other
scenarios.  If you google for such uses, you'll find statements like
"Adults emerge in September and hibernate until the spring thaw", which
conveys a reasonable analogy to this scenario.  Reptiles are described
by biologists as "freezing" and "thawing", but I think "freeze" is
overused at enough places that we should remain weary of its
connotations, and it's fairly similar, conceptually, to hibernation.

>  and the oppostite of thaw is freeze. Which is probably 
> why we use the later for what we do to processes when hibernating the system.

... and that's really close enough for the already rather stretched
analogy.
-- 
  Peter