[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] packaging terminology confusion

[Brad Allen]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Fred Drake <fdrake at gmail.com> wrote:

> The point of carefully defined terminology is primarily to make sure
> that relatively formal communication, such as technical documentation,
> can be carried out both effectively and efficiently.  There's no need
> to dictate terminology for casual communication, where context is
> usually sufficient.

Fred Drake said:
> The point of carefully defined terminology is primarily to make sure
> that relatively formal communication, such as technical documentation,
> can be carried out both effectively and efficiently.

Nevertheless, formal terminology imost useful when it agrees with
common usage; after all, we also want informal discussion (such as we
have on distutils, everyday work, user groups, etc.) to be effective
and efficient. In this case the formal terminology is so cumbersome
that people tend not to use in technical documentation.

>There's no need
> to dictate terminology for casual communication, where context is
> usually sufficient.

Ah, well we can't dictate that anyway, can we? This is a negotiation,
not an attempt to dictate. People will say what they want to say. The
goal here is to improve the formal terminology and change it in the
documentation, in such a way that informal discussions are more likely
to adopt the formal terminology and to be consistent with the
documentation.