Need help to understand a phrase

Jim Blandy jimb at red-bean.com
Fri Feb 10 17:41:55 CST 2006


On 2/10/06, CĂ©lio Cidral Junior <ccidral.newsbox at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need help to understand a phrase which is in the first chapter (I'm
> brazillian). The point where it's knocking me down is "some
> well-placed prods", and can be found in src/en/ch01.xml, at line 108,
> revision 1990. Dictionaries didn't help me this time. Can somebody put
> it in other words, please?

Here's a literal rephrasing:

"With the help of some guidance from Brian Behlendorf and Jason
Robbins of CollabNet,"

To "prod" someone is to poke them; in this context, it means to
encourage them or to make recommendations about a particular direction
to take.  A "well-placed prod" is probably a poke in some sensitive
area of the body; in context, it suggests that the recommendations may
have been rather strong.

So the suggestion here is that the Subversion team at that point had
some disagreements with Brian, Jason, and Greg, but ended up following
their advice anyway, and things turned out for the better because of
that.




More information about the svnbook-dev mailing list