Hola-hallo, On 2023-Nov-13, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2023-11-13 12:31:42 +0100, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > > On 2023-Nov-09, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > > > doc: fix wording describing the checkpoint_flush_after GUC > > > > Hmm. Is this new wording really more clear than the original wording? > > I agree the original may not have been the most simple, but I don't > > think it was wrong English. > > I think it was somewhat wrong (I probably wrote it) or at least awkwardly > formulated. "force the OS that pages .. should be flushed" doesn't make a ton > of sense. Heh, you know what? I was mistaken. There was indeed a grammatical error being fixed. The complaint [1] was that "you" was missing in the sentence, and apparently that's correct [2]. [1] https://postgr.es/m/155208475619.1380.12815553062985622...@wrigleys.postgresql.org [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/60285 So the core of the requested change was to turn "allows to force" into "allows you to force". And this means that your new proposal: > It probably should be something like: > On Linux and POSIX platforms <xref linkend="guc-checkpoint-flush-after"/> > allows to request that the OS flushes pages written by the checkpoint to > disk > after a configurable number of bytes. Otherwise, these [...] would still fall afoul of the reported problem, because it still says "allows to request", which is bad English. > OTOH, the new formulation doesn't seem great either. The request(s) that we > make to the OS are not guaranteed to be followed, so the "should be" was > actually a correct part of the sentence. Hmm, I hadn't noticed that nuance. Your text looks OK to me, except that "... after a configurable number of bytes" reads odd after what's already in the sentence. I would rewrite it in a different form, maybe On Linux and POSIX platforms, checkpoint_flush_after specifies the number of bytes written by a checkpoint after which the OS is requested to flush pages to disk. Otherwise, these pages ... Cheers -- Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/ "Ninguna manada de bestias tiene una voz tan horrible como la humana" (Orual)
