Thread: s/rewinded/rewound/?
Hello, The word "rewinded" appears in our manual and in a comment. That sounds strange to my ears. Isn't it a mistake? Oxford lists the form as "poetic" and "rare", and then says it was used by one specific Victorian poet. Perhaps I'll send them a pull request: it's now G. M. Hopkins and PostgreSQL? Or maybe it's in common usage in another part of the world? -- Thomas Munro https://enterprisedb.com
On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 10:49 AM Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
The word "rewinded" appears in our manual and in a comment. That
sounds strange to my ears. Isn't it a mistake? Oxford lists the form
as "poetic" and "rare", and then says it was used by one specific
Victorian poet. Perhaps I'll send them a pull request: it's now G. M.
Hopkins and PostgreSQL? Or maybe it's in common usage in another part
of the world?
To me this sounds like a classic non-English-native-speaker-mistake. But it seems at least the one in the docs come from Bruce, who definitely is... So perhaps it's intentional to refer to "what pg_rewind does", and not necessarily to the regular word for it?
On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 10:53:45AM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote: > To me this sounds like a classic non-English-native-speaker-mistake. But > it seems at least the one in the docs come from Bruce, who definitely is... > So perhaps it's intentional to refer to "what pg_rewind does", and not > necessarily to the regular word for it? I am not sure :) "rewound" sounds much more natural. -- Michael
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On 8/7/19 12:00 PM, Michael Paquier wrote: > On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 10:53:45AM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote: >> To me this sounds like a classic non-English-native-speaker-mistake. But >> it seems at least the one in the docs come from Bruce, who definitely is... >> So perhaps it's intentional to refer to "what pg_rewind does", and not >> necessarily to the regular word for it? > I am not sure :) > "rewound" sounds much more natural. > -- > Michael +1 for rewound from a non-English-native-speaker. The use of "rewound" in the same file also supports Michael's view. If we decide to fix this, we should probably revise and back-patch the whole paragraph where it appears as it seems to mix up scanning target cluster WALs and applying source cluster WALs. A small patch is attached for your consideration (originally proposed on pgsql-docs [1]). [1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ad6ac5bb-6689-ddb0-dc60-c5fc197d728e%40postgrespro.ru -- Liudmila Mantrova Technical writer at Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com The Russian Postgres Company
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On 08/07/19 04:48, Thomas Munro wrote: > as "poetic" and "rare", and then says it was used by one specific > Victorian poet. Perhaps I'll send them a pull request: it's now G. M. > Hopkins and PostgreSQL? It does seem counter, original, spare, strange. Regards, -Chap
Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 10:49 AM Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The word "rewinded" appears in our manual and in a comment. That
>> sounds strange to my ears. Isn't it a mistake?
Certainly.
> To me this sounds like a classic non-English-native-speaker-mistake. But
> it seems at least the one in the docs come from Bruce, who definitely is...
He might've just been committing somebody else's words without having
reviewed carefully.
regards, tom lane
On 2019-Aug-07, Tom Lane wrote: > Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes: > > To me this sounds like a classic non-English-native-speaker-mistake. But > > it seems at least the one in the docs come from Bruce, who definitely is... > > He might've just been committing somebody else's words without having > reviewed carefully. The commit message for 878bd9accb55 doesn't mention that. He didn't add a mailing list reference, but this is easy to find at https://postgr.es/m/20160720180706.GF24559@momjian.us I lean towards the view that he was using the literal program name as a verb, rather than trying to decline a verb normally. Note that the word "rewound" did not appear in that SGML source when he committed that; that was only introduced in bfc80683ce51 three years later. -- Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
On Wed, 7 Aug 2019 at 16:59, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > He didn't > add a mailing list reference, but this is easy to find at > https://postgr.es/m/20160720180706.GF24559@momjian.us > I lean towards the view that he was using the literal program name as a > verb, rather than trying to decline a verb normally. I go with that, although I think it's confusing to not use the full app name. If I were discussing a block of data that had been passed to a "rewind" function, I might well put "this data has been rewind()ed" (or just rewinded). But if I were discussing the concept itself, I would say rewound. eg In the example given, I would accept "and then <application>pg_rewind</application>ed to become a standby". Although I would probably have reworded it to use "and then <application>pg_rewind</application> run again to set it to standby" or something similar, because the "ed" form really does look odd in documentation. I don't think using "rewound" instead is explicit enough in this instance. But that's just me. Feel free to ignore. Geoff
On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 12:48:29PM +0300, Liudmila Mantrova wrote: > If we decide to fix this, we should probably revise and back-patch the whole > paragraph where it appears as it seems to mix up scanning target cluster > WALs and applying source cluster WALs. A small patch is attached for your > consideration (originally proposed on pgsql-docs [1]). Okay, I can see the confusion, and your proposed rewording looks fine to me. Any objections? -- Michael