Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-15 Thread Neil Conway
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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-14 Thread Neil Conway
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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-14 Thread Michael Fuhr
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:
  Correct several typos in the documentation.
 
 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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Neil Conway
On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 00:39 -0600, Michael Fuhr wrote:
 *** doc/src/sgml/cvs.sgml   11 Aug 2005 13:52:33 -  1.34
 --- doc/src/sgml/cvs.sgml   13 Oct 2005 06:15:38 -
 ***
 *** 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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Andrew Dunstan



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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Tom Lane
Andrew Dunstan [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Neil Conway
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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Neil Conway
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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Andrew Dunstan



Michael Fuhr wrote:


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.

 



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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Neil Conway
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.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Andrew Dunstan



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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Peter Eisentraut
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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Re: [PATCHES] Documentation typos

2005-10-13 Thread Peter Eisentraut
Neil Conway wrote:
 http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/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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