Disk check message is grammatically incorrect

Also, the phrase "This may take some time" is verbose and meaningless: everything takes time.

Better to say, "Checking disk drives for errors; please wait." (Avoid using "you" or "your" because the drives might not actually belong to that person.)

Would be great to see a % complete, too, so users know approximately how long to wait.

While it's usual for short messages to have no end punctuation, and it's quite reasonable to say "your disk drives" since "your" means possession (not ownership), the comma splice is annoying. I suggest either the version suggested by Jonathan or the following (which I prefer due to its greater simplicity): "Your drives[1] are being checked for errors; this may take some time".

[1] The original message refers to disk drives, but I presume that there isn't a separate message for solid-state drives.

Here's a patch with my suggested grammatical fixes (there were a few other lines with the same sort of issue). Who do I have to beg to get this merged in?

I didn't end it in a period because none of the other messages are complete sentences either, but since Plymouth looks so nice and professional, I think the messages that get displayed on it should as well. I would be happy to turn as many of those as possible into reasonably proper sentences without getting TOO verbose...

Also, I agree that "disk drives" is redundant. It should be one or the other.

Oops- patch was against 2.14. This is against 2.15.

Agree with Thangalin and nstenz; "disk drives" is redundant, and "some time" is meaningless.

nstenz patch only adds a period before the first sentence. I understand that short messages can sometimes drop their periods, but for consistency I think they should all have periods.

My proposed verbiage:

Your disks are being checked for errors. This may take a few minutes.

Press C to cancel all checks in progress.

I've used nstenz's patch with some of Jay's suggestions. I agree with the comma and semicolon changes. I put periods on the ends of all the user visible statements; I tend to agree they look like they need them. I chose to say 'several minutes' instead of 'few minutes' since fsck's can sometimes take a significant amount of time.

I think there is a good point made that 'disk drive' seems jargonish, but 'disk' and 'drive' have non-computer meanings that I could imagine being confused ("What; has my computer turned into a chiropractor?") I've opted to leave that change out and retain 'disk drive' for now; it could use further discussion in a new bug report, though.

This bug was fixed in the package mountall - 2.26

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mountall (2.26) oneiric; urgency=low

  * Correct grammar on user-visible strings
    (LP: #572016)
 -- Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:16:22 -0700

This was not actually fixed. As of today, it tells me "Checking disks are for errors...".

Why is 'are' in there?

Yep, it's messed up all right. My patch said:
+ message = NIH_MUST (nih_strdup (NULL, _("Your disk drives are being checked for errors. This may take some time")));

The final patch says:
  message = NIH_MUST (nih_strdup (NULL, _("Checking disk drives are for errors. This may take several minutes.")));

So I'm guessing that "are" is left over from what I had written. Drop that and it's good. Patch attached.

And it looks like I can't reopen this, but it wouldn't make sense to start a NEW bug...

>> I can't reopen this

Heheh... Oh well, hopefully the patch will make it in soon, and we can restrain ourselves from raving over this trivial point for the time being. :) Thanks for the fix!