On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 09:56:00AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann said: > The Hurd (or the GNU Hurd if you want to m,ake it clear it is a GNU project > and part of the GNU system) is the Hurd or the GNU Hurd, but never GNU/Hurd. > It is never "Hurd", "HURD", "GNU Hurd" or "GNU HURD", and also not "the GNU > HURD" or "the HURD" or other spellings of the Hurd. > > You can say GNU/Hurd or GNU/Hurd system if you want the whole GNU system > (including the Hurd, but also XFree86 etc). You can say Debian GNU/Linux > when referring to the GNU/Hurd system as shipped by Debian.
Somehow I see this going the way of Xwindows[sic]. Specifically, as a frequent correction offered by pedants to uninterested newbies. In any case, no matter whether it is "right" or not, a person new to all of this will most likely say "the Hurd" but leave out the "the" with "GNU Hurd", as that sounds the best[1]. Also keep in mind there will always be some people who consistently misspell it as "HURD" or some variation thereof under the assumption that since it is an acronym[3] it must be capitalized[4]. For the record[5], I prefer "Debian GNU/Hurd" as the name for Debian's release of "GNU Hurd", which includes a set of servers called "the Hurd". Oh well, back to hacking. Kevin [1] where "best" means the most like the rest of English[2]. [2] see a current thread of -devel for what the rest of English entails. [3] an mutually recursive at that.. what's the proper method for referring to "HIRD"? [4] these are the same people who refer to Perl as PERL. [5] in case anyone actually cares. -- Kevin Kreamer