[MPlayer-DOCS] [RFC] Binary packaging guidelines

[Josh Varner]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 19:53:28 -0500, The Wanderer
<inverseparadox at comcast.net> wrote:
> Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > On Wednesday, 17 November 2004 at 20:02, The Wanderer wrote:
> >
> >>Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> >>
> >>>About this document
> >>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> >>> With the release of MPlayer 0.90pre9 all licensing issues have
> >>> been eliminated and all code is licensed under the GPL. This
> >>> allows creating and distributing binary packages.
> >>
> >> "creation and distribution" (possibly preceded by "the" and
> >> followed by "of").
> >
> > Sorry, but I've never seen such constructs. All my grammar books, on
> > the other hand, are saying that either "allow + to + inf." or "allow
> > + gerund" is possible.
> 
> Yes, that is valid in the technical sense, and in some cases it's
> probably completely acceptable - but I don't think it flows well in this
> instance. I have no real justification, except to say that as things
> stand, the final sentence quoted looks to me like broken English, and I
> don't think I'd be entirely alone in that.
> 
Converting verbs to this from is call nominalizing, e.g. the
nominalization for creating is creation. The use of nominalizations
should be kept to a minimum, and may be why they are not mentioned in
your grammar books, but then again English is one of those fun
languages where the grammar is defined by common usage, rather than
usage being defined via some standard grammar.

The awkwardness of this sentence comes from the indefinite subject. If
the sentence read "Mplayer allows creating and distributing packages"
it would sound more natural. The lack of a concrete subject lends the
sentence to the use of nominalization because a nominalization means
"the act or action of doing x." Since this is an action without any
particular actor it fits with the indefinite subject, while the gerund
form feels odd without a concrete actor. Even the form with a subject
is not the best since Mplayer is allowing someone else to create and
distribute, again leading to nominalization as the second actor is
unspecified.

Josh

P.S. If you are interested in English style concerns, my wife was an
English major, and I learned a great deal from a few short books she
owned.
- The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
- Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition) by Joseph M. Williams
Both of these books give excellent treatments of style concerns beyond
grammatical correctness in a straight-forward and readable manner.