Re: Bug#312600: logtool

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 11:06:44AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 03:13:01PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> > While translating the file logtool, I encountered the following  
> > typos, which I thought you might like to eliminate in a future release.
> [...]
> > "Either ... or" is only used with groups of two. When you have more  
> > than two things, you use "one of ... or ... or ...". So:
> > 
> > "Note that each option can be specified only once for one of paranoid,
> > server, or workstation."
> 
> It doesn't seem incorrect to me, but then I'm not a native English
> speaker and so is Clytie.

That should be either "... and neither is Clytie" or "... but Clytie
is", depending on which you meant. :-)

> debian-l10n-english, is the current sentence indeed incorrect?

I agree with Clytie that the current sentence is incorrect: "either"
should only be used to distinguish between two items, not among more
than two. I find the proposed replacement rather unclear, though, and I
had to go and read the source to puzzle out exactly what it meant. How
about this?

  Note that each option can be specified for only one of paranoid,
  server, or workstation.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]