Re: PATCH: copy-edit File-I/O section of manual

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 13:10:30 -0400
> From: Sandra Loosemore <sandra@codesourcery.com>
> 
> Thanks, Daniel.  On reflection, I think Eli and I are just thinking at 
> cross-purposes here.  Eli is worried about what has changed at a line-by-line 
> level, while I have been thinking in terms of the "big picture" of bringing the 
> writing in this section as a whole up to an acceptable standard of quality for a 
> professional document.

If you can present the patch in a way that makes this big picture
show, it might help me review the patch sooner.  Based on my
experience, such a presentation will need to use something other than
Diff, though.

> That's why I suggested applying the patch and proofreading the
> resulting text.

You are asking me to proofread a large portion of text, instead of
concentrating on the relatively small differences.  This is precisely
the large job which I'm trying to avoid as much as possible, because
it takes so much more time.  That is why I prefer small, isolated
diffs that can be approved without re-reading entire chapters.  By
contrast, significant changes that rearrange the material absolutely
_require_ to consider the overall effect of the structural changes,
which means I need to read, or at least skim, across large portions of
the manual, and consider didactic issues in addition to purely
linguistic, grammatic, and markup-related aspects.