Dear coreboot folks,
following up on Ron’s comment to Gerrit item(?) 2695 [1]
We can't break out each and every vendor TLA (Three Letter Acronym) or we'll be here for years. I understand the possible confusion, but at the same time, there are terms of the art that we just use, ULT, PCI, DMA, HT, PNP, I2C, being some of them. It's a dreadful learning curve, but we all get to climb it :-)
I propose the following rule (suggestion, guideline) for usage of abbreviations in commit messages and code.
Abbreviations – mostly three letter acronyms (TLA) – should be written out in full additionally once when used the first time in a file or commit message, when no Wikipedia article exists for that abbreviation or pops up when searching for that abbreviation.
Following that rule, PCI, USB or GPIO would not have to be written out fully, but CRB (Customer Reference Board) or ULT (low power Haswell variant) would be needed to be written out or explained once.
The reasoning is that coreboot should be attractive to hobby hackers too and not having to look up these terms saves them some time and eases the “dreadful learning curve” in my opinion. Especially writing them out takes programmers less than five seconds as they can type really fast.
Following this rule would make it easier for outsiders to dive into coreboot.
What do you think? If you agree, I’ll put it to the development guidelines or Git section of the coreboot Wiki.
Thanks,
Paul