English descriptions of tunables

[technotic]

Hi. I just happened to be looking through the tunables again today in the UI, and the descriptions of a few of them have finally bugged me enough to want to do something about it 😀 for example, for net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack the description says "Do not delay ACK to try and piggyback it onto a data packet" most likely because the default value is 0, which turns off delayed ack. But the description could easily be mistaken by someone where English isn't their first language, or a person who lists 25 certs in their Xwitter display name, to mean that enabling the option (value of 1) would be the correct value to achieve the results of the description. This is just one example, but there are quite a few that have "odd" descriptions that describe the nonsense defaulted option, but can confuse, mislead, or just seem to miss the mark.

I would like to update these and submit the revision for review, and I'm not sure the right way to go about doing that. I'm guessing it's all one single locale file? If so, would it be best to submit the revisions as a patch file to replace the whole tunables section? A file containing only the tunables section so that the devs can review and just replace manually? The only problem I see with a patch file against the current release version is obviously it won't match if any changes have been made on the dev branch.

Would it be preferable to clone the dev branch and then do a pull request for the locale file?

PS- what if I were interested also (and separately) providing help hints for core menus or official plugin menus? I can take a look at current UI code and replicate the current method to place an anchor and the hint text, since this would be adding hints for some items that don't have hints but could use them. I would even be willing to do the mundane task of placing a help hint to show correct formatting (there are a couple menu items that don't have it) as well as adding something like the following, for the entry fields that it applies to: "Press Enter to create an entry from your current text input. Additional entries may be added. To remove an entry, tap/click to select it, and press Backspace."

As for the help hint text, Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." and I believe the purpose of the help hints is to clarify what information is expected and, where necessary, identify fields that shouldn't be populated unless you already know it needs to be populated.

If there is a specific person that is in charge of this, perhaps you can put me in touch with them and I can submit edit suggestions to them. I'm not trying to step on anyone's dick. There's a lot of text to maintain. And if we go by old school standards, documentation is only created under severe intoxication. A person only has so many livers.

Thanks in advance.

[franco]

The descriptions come from the kernel and there is no sane way to translate them now or in the future.


Cheers,
Franco