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bug#12530: nice(1) man page, bad wording


From: Pádraig Brady
Subject: bug#12530: nice(1) man page, bad wording
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:25:31 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110816 Thunderbird/6.0

On 09/28/2012 02:25 PM, Voelker, Bernhard wrote:
David Diggles wrote (Friday, September 28, 2012 4:45 AM)

DESCRIPTION
        Run  COMMAND  with an adjusted niceness, which affects process
scheduling.  With no COMMAND, print the current niceness.  Nicenesses
range from -20
        (most favorable scheduling) to 19 (least favorable).

Favorable to what?  It really does not explain, since it can be
interpreted in opposite ways.  Please use words like higher and lower
priority.

Hello to Brisbane!

Thanks for the report.

"Favorable" means the kernel will favor this process before
it will take "least favorable" processes into account for
scheduling.

I don't think the words "higher"/"lower" will bring clarity
to it, maybe it'd even be worse because a higher nice number
leads to lower priority.

What about a stronger term like "aggressive scheduling"?

Well with relative terms, it's best to state what they're relative to,
so I'll apply something like this, as the wording is ambiguous.

thanks!
Pádraig.

diff --git a/src/nice.c b/src/nice.c
index 1a90320..12d0b0f 100644
--- a/src/nice.c
+++ b/src/nice.c
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ usage (int status)
       printf (_("\
 Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling.\n\
 With no COMMAND, print the current niceness.  Nicenesses range from\n\
-%d (most favorable scheduling) to %d (least favorable).\n\
+%d (least favorable to the system) to %d (least favorable to the process).\n\
 \n\
   -n, --adjustment=N   add integer N to the niceness (default 10)\n\
 "),





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