PostgreSQL Patches - Documentation typos

Author

Documentation typos

Michael Fuhr

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Correct several typos in the documentation.

I took the liberty of making the following spelling changes for
consistency with the rest of the documentation, even though the
originals are the preferred spellings in some parts of the English-
speaking world. I found only one or two instances of each; the
latter forms were far more common.

behaviour => behavior
organisation => organization
recognised => recognized
recognises => recognizes

--
Michael Fuhr

Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 00:39 -0600, Michael Fuhr wrote:
> *** doc/src/sgml/cvs.sgml 11 Aug 2005 13:52:33 -0000 1.34
> --- doc/src/sgml/cvs.sgml 13 Oct 2005 06:15:38 -0000
> ***************
> *** 849,855 ****
> to you the malloc code and an additional installation e-mail from
> John.
>
> The Modula-3 installation takes a good bit of room (~50MB?) and the
> ! build environment is unique to Modula-3, but suprisingly enough it
> pretty much works.
>
> The cvsup Makefiles do not work on my machine (they are not portable
> --- 849,855 ----
> to you the malloc code and an additional installation e-mail from
> John.
>
> The Modula-3 installation takes a good bit of room (~50MB?) and the
> ! build environment is unique to Modula-3, but surprisingly enough it
> pretty much works.
>
> The cvsup Makefiles do not work on my machine (they are not
> portable

This change modifies an SGML comment that contains the text of an email
thread, so it is debatable whether we should be modifying it. However,
is there a good reason for this comment to be in cvs.sgml to begin with?

I agree we should pick American or British spelling and use one
consistently. Barring any objections, I'll apply the rest of the patch
within a day or two.

-Neil

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Andrew Dunstan

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Michael Fuhr wrote:

>I took the liberty of making the following spelling changes for
>consistency with the rest of the documentation, even though the
>originals are the preferred spellings in some parts of the English-
>speaking world. I found only one or two instances of each; the
>latter forms were far more common.
>
>behaviour => behavior
>organisation => organization
>recognised => recognized
>recognises => recognizes
>
>
>

You seem to have lots of time on your hands if you can worry about this.
How you spend it is your business, of course, but playing spelling cop
doesn't seem worth it to me.

Is there an official spelling standard for PostgreSQL? If so, where is
it stated? If we are going to adopt one I'd vote for the OED :-) I am so
unconscious of it that it will be impossible for me to undo the habits
of a lifetime, and I suspect I am not alone, so this would be a never
ending battle.

cheers

andrew

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Dave Page

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-patches-owner@postgresql.org
> [mailto:pgsql-patches-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of
> Andrew Dunstan
> Sent: 13 October 2005 14:56
> To: Michael Fuhr
> Cc: pgsql-patches@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos
>
>
> You seem to have lots of time on your hands if you can worry
> about this.
> How you spend it is your business, of course, but playing
> spelling cop
> doesn't seem worth it to me.
>
> Is there an official spelling standard for PostgreSQL? If so,
> where is
> it stated? If we are going to adopt one I'd vote for the OED
> :-) I am so
> unconscious of it that it will be impossible for me to undo
> the habits
> of a lifetime, and I suspect I am not alone, so this would be a never
> ending battle.

I'm inclined to agree, but then maybe that's because I'm about 8 miles
from Oxford right now, and spent years at school being told off for
spelling things in American.

Regards, Dave.

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Tom Lane

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> Is there an official spelling standard for PostgreSQL?

There is not. Given that a substantial fraction of our community is
accustomed to British spellings, I've never felt that it was appropriate
to try to standardize either way. I just leave it the way the author of
that particular bit of documentation wrote it.

regards, tom lane

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Michael Fuhr

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:55:55AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> You seem to have lots of time on your hands if you can worry about this.
> How you spend it is your business, of course, but playing spelling cop
> doesn't seem worth it to me.

Whether you agree or not, some people judge a product in part by
the quality of its documentation. Spelling mistakes detract from
that quality, and since it takes only a few minutes with a spellchecker
to find and fix them, the effort does seem worth it to me. You
might consider that statements such as the above only discourage
people from taking such efforts.

Regarding American vs. British spelling, my spellchecker flagged
the latter, so I did a quick grep to see which was the more prevalent
in the rest of the documentation and made them all the same for
consistency. It doesn't matter to me which we use, but my vote
would be that we use one form consistently rather than mix them.

--
Michael Fuhr

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Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 09:55 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> You seem to have lots of time on your hands if you can worry about this.
> How you spend it is your business, of course, but playing spelling cop
> doesn't seem worth it to me.

I think it's a perfectly valid thing to fix. Part of quality is getting
the details right, and following consistent conventions for spelling and
grammar in the documentation is part of that.

> Is there an official spelling standard for PostgreSQL?

No, although I think there ought to be one.

-Neil

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Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 10:16 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Given that a substantial fraction of our community is accustomed to
> British spellings, I've never felt that it was appropriate to try to
> standardize either way.

The same reasoning applies to the audience of (and contributors to) most
publications. AFAIK it is not considered good style to mix spelling
variants freely -- we should pick one variant and use it consistently.

(If we're going to be really precise, we could also decide to follow a
set of conventions on punctuation, capitalization, and other minor style
issues, but I can't get too excited about it.)

-Neil

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Andrew Dunstan

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Michael Fuhr wrote:

>On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:55:55AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
>
>Whether you agree or not, some people judge a product in part by
>the quality of its documentation. Spelling mistakes detract from
>that quality, and since it takes only a few minutes with a spellchecker
>to find and fix them, the effort does seem worth it to me. You
>might consider that statements such as the above only discourage
>people from taking such efforts.
>
>Regarding American vs. British spelling, my spellchecker flagged
>the latter, so I did a quick grep to see which was the more prevalent
>in the rest of the documentation and made them all the same for
>consistency. It doesn't matter to me which we use, but my vote
>would be that we use one form consistently rather than mix them.
>
>
>

I was (perhaps badly) attempting to be mildly humorous. I agree that
typos should be fixed. I don't agree that we need to force one spelling
of common words when many dictionaries recognise the validity of variant
spellings. English is not a precisely defined language - that's part of
its beauty. I live in a part of the world where pronunciation can be
truly mystifying, and spelling can often be also. You learn to live with it.

cheers

andrew (who refuses to spell aluminium with only one i)

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Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 12:17 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> I don't agree that we need to force one spelling of common words when
> many dictionaries recognise the validity of variant spellings.

There is obviously no "need" to force the use of one spelling variant or
another. However, I think it is good style to consistently use either
American or British English. To pick the first example from Google, the
FreeBSD documentation group do this:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...ting-style.html

And they face many of the same challenges we do as far as contributors
from different regions of the world.

-Neil

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Michael Fuhr

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 01:48:11PM -0400, Neil Conway wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 12:17 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> There is obviously no "need" to force the use of one spelling variant or
> another. However, I think it is good style to consistently use either
> American or British English.

To give an idea of the scope of the changes I submitted, here are
counts for the words I changed and their variants:

2 behaviour 195 behavior
1 organisation 6 organization
1 recognised 35 recognized
1 recognises 4 recognizes

That's 5 changes out of 245 total occurrences.

--
Michael Fuhr

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Andrew Dunstan

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Michael Fuhr wrote:

>That's 5 changes out of 245 total occurrences.
>
>
>

So what? I just don't see consistency as being a value in itself, but
only when it has some other merit. Clearly you don't agree, but I am
with Emerson on the subject of consistency.

cheers

andrew

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Peter Eisentraut

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Is there an official spelling standard for PostgreSQL?

While nothing is ever really official around here, the documentation is
susceptible to being hit by my spell-checking tool, which has
historically tended to use whatever "american" aspell dictionary I had
installed at the time.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

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Peter Eisentraut

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

Neil Conway wrote:
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...rimer/writing-s
>tyle.html

I can heartily recommend this, and I have deferred to this many times
over the years.

I disagree with the point on "Avoid redundant phrases", though, and in
fact it contradicts error message style guideline 43.3.9., so it's
explicit. :)

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

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Christopher Kings-Lynne

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

> So what? I just don't see consistency as being a value in itself, but
> only when it has some other merit. Clearly you don't agree, but I am
> with Emerson on the subject of consistency.

So you're saying you're consistent in your objections to consistency? :)

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Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 00:39 -0600, Michael Fuhr wrote:
> Correct several typos in the documentation.

Are there any remaining objections to this patch? Otherwise, I'll apply
it within 24 hours.

-Neil

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Michael Fuhr

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 06:18:08PM -0400, Neil Conway wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 00:39 -0600, Michael Fuhr wrote:
>
> Are there any remaining objections to this patch? Otherwise, I'll apply
> it within 24 hours.

I could submit a version with randomi[sz]ed spellings if it would
make certain people happier ;-)

--
Michael Fuhr

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Neil Conway

2005-10-27, 8:15 am

On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 00:39 -0600, Michael Fuhr wrote:
> Correct several typos in the documentation.

Applied to HEAD -- thanks for the patch.

I also removed the comment from the cvs.sgml file.

-Neil

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