RPMS

[Patrick Williams]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 01:08:06AM +0300, Alexander Amelkin wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> I have just noticed that we use a wrong unit name for revolutions per 
> minute.
> The unit we use is called RPMS, which renders to "Revolution Per MinuteS".
> The term RPM is already plural in nature and doesn't need the 'S' suffix.

I think you're talking about the dbus interface [1]?

The units in that interface are all in their plural form.  I don't
recall why we decided to do that originally.

> I believe it needs to be renamed to just 'RPM', what do you think?

In many cases of pluralized acronyms the 's' is moved to the end even
though it adds ambiguity as to which underlying word is pluralized.  I
think this is an artifact of spoken English where almost all plural
forms end with an 's' so it is natural to add them to acronyms.

The Cambridge dictionary indicates that either RPM or RPMs would be a
valid plural form [2].  

Interestingly, CFM is arguably both the singular and plural form because
the 'f' can be 'foot' or 'feet'.

> The unit is used very widely, so a lot of files in openbmc project
> and a number of other project will need to be updated.


We did make a minor mistake in that it should be 'RPMs' and not 'RPMS',
but I don't really see that as high-value work to fix at this point.  If
someone wants to go make that change across all the impacted
repositories, I'd certainly merge it in PDI.  If anyone feels strongly
about making it 'RPM' instead at the same time, I'd be fine with that as
well.

1. https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-dbus-interfaces/blob/master/xyz/openbmc_project/Sensor/Value.interface.yaml#L55
2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/rpm
-- 
Patrick Williams
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