On 06/03/2010 08:01 AM, Christina Gratorp wrote: > Hi! Hello,
You mailed the autoconf list, but complained about the automake manual. You may want to resend this to a more appropriate list if you want anything to change, since this sentence does not appear in the autoconf manual. > > I found a bug in the intro pages for automake: > http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Introduction. The sentence > "The developer expresses the recipe to build *his* package in a Makefile" > must be wrong since I'm a woman and a user and have packages I want to build > and those packages are mine, i.e *hers* would be correct in this case. Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages where the pronoun "his" can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that "his" looks better than "his/hers", as long as you understand that the usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. > > Suggestion: change the sentence to "The developer expresses the recipe to > build *his/hers* package in a Makefile" or "The developer expresses the > recipe to build *the* package in a Makefile" Changing to "the" loses the notion of ownership; and as there is more than one package with mention in the sentence (which package: the developer's, or Automake?), I feel that losing the possessive pronoun would be a step backwards. And using "the developer's" feels redundant. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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