[Pkg-iscsi-maintainers] Bug#877949: Package description: do you really mean "offload"?

[Justin B Rye]

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
>   "This package is required to offload iSCSI onto these devices."
> 
> Not being a native English speaker, I found [2]. Thus I believe that
> "offload" and "onto" don't fit together. And I'm wondering what would
> be a better wording.
> 
> Perhaps
>   "You need this package|software to make these devices work with iSCSI"?
> 
> Hopyfully some native speaker has a better suggestion for this sentence
> and the short description.

For this native speaker, "offloading" always has negative overtones,
as in the example given by wiktionary: "He offloaded the defective car
onto an unsuspecting buyer".  However, this may be an en-US/en-GB
thing; American sources give examples like "offloading boxes from a
truck", which for me would be "unloading boxes from a lorry"...

There seem to be fields where the noun has come to be used as
technical jargon - for instance, people talk about "TCP Offload
Engines" - but "https://www.chelsio.com/nic/iscsi-offload/" (for
example) mostly avoids turning it back into a verb.


If it's worth changing, possible alternatives include:

 This package is required to support iSCSI offload for these devices.

or just:

 This package is required to "offload" iSCSI onto these devices.


The short description for iscsiuio has

 iSCSI offloading daemon for QLogic devices

If I'm right about the noun being better established as jargon than
the verb, this might as well just drop the "-ing", and maybe add a
hyphen:

 iSCSI-offload daemon for QLogic devices

-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package