Re: [hatari-devel] Re: IDE byte swapping options

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2018-10-18 00:23, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 10/16/18 8:00 AM, Thomas Huth wrote:
>> Am Sun, 14 Oct 2018 11:47:09 +0300
>> schrieb Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> On 10/13/18 6:33 PM, Thomas Huth wrote:
>>>> No, does not look OK. Please don't change "it is" to "it's" (since
>>>> that is colloquial) and don't use single generic names for things
>>>> that are related to a specific subsystem. Something like
>>>> "--ide-swap" would be more adequate.
>>>
>>> Ok, I pushed the patch with the requested changes.
>>>
>>> (I tried earlier --ide-byteswap, but that was definitely too long,
>>> --ide-swap is much better.)
>>>
>>> Note: Hatari command line options are needed to add features to the
>>> Python UI, and as long as MacOS UI is missing support for the
>>> feature, people there need command line options with that too.
>>
>> Eero, don't tell me what's necessary. I would have added this CLI option
>> sooner or later, too. It's just that I'm currently incredibly short in
>> spare time again.
> 
> What I meant is that I needed the command line feature, so I
> thought to help us both by doing the easy part of the feature.
> 
> (Unfortunately I went wrong in refactoring python-UI dialogs afterwards,
> so I didn't get into adding byteswap support to disk dialog last
> weekend. Note sure when I have next time to attempt the refactoring.)
> 
>> But if that's such a big problem for you, then it's
>> maybe better if I do not add any new features to Hatari anymore.
> 
> I think it should be obvious that we all appreciate each others'
> contributions to Hatari.
> 
> If I say something stupid (= be "Captain Obvious"), please try to
> ignore it instead of being offended.

Ok. Reading through my mail again, that was way to harsh, indeed. Sorry
for that. It's just that I'm currently a little bit stressed, and I then
your mail in the way "you didn't implement that fast enough, so I had to
implement this on my own and here are the reasons why you should
implement things immediately next time"... looks like I've got that
wrong, sorry.

> (I read "colloquial" in your earlier mail as "unprofessional", so
> I first got annoyed myself.  Regardless of whether more colloquial
> language suits Hatari documentation, those changes didn't belong to
> the patch though.)

I meant "colloquial" in the sense of "should not be used in written
English texts like manuals", not in the sense of "unprofessional". At
least this is what our teachers taught us in school. Looking at some
pages in the internet, it seems that some agree (e.g.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9096/usage-of-contractions-like-its-and-thats-in-textbooks
) while others say that it could also rather be a regional thing (e.g.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20275/are-contractions-like-didnt-forbidden-in-written-english
) ... I'm also not a native speaker, but as far as I can see, "it is"
sounds "safer" for formal texts to me.

By the way, looks like we're rather informal in the manual:

$ grep -i " it's " manual.html | wc -l
22
$ grep -i " it is " manual.html | wc -l
11

.... maybe we should standardize on one of the two spellings?

>> By the way, while we're speaking of doing our homework properly: Please
>> fix the HTML bugs that you've introduced in the manual (i.e. please
>> check your HTML with https://validator.w3.org before you push it to the
>> repository). Thanks!
> 
> Thanks, I hadn't noticed those.  I commited a fix.
> 
> Is validator available also as offline Linux program so that it could
> be used in a build test, or is it available only as a web service?

I'm not aware of any real validator program that is packaged by the
usual Linux distros. But maybe we could use "tidy -e -q" in the test
suite if the program is installed?

> If latter, release checklist could have a step for running
> the validator.
> 
> There isn't currently such list, but I could add one to docs.
> What else should be in Hatari release checklist?

Run tests/tosboot maybe?

 Thomas