Possible spelling fixes

Started by Josh Sorefabout 9 years ago25 messageshackers
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#1Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com

Hi.
I'm going through project-by-project offering spelling fixes.
I have read your submission suggestions [1]https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch[2]http://petereisentraut.blogspot.ca/2009/09/how-to-submit-patch-by-email.html and am choosing to
disregard them.

Could someone please review the changes I have [3]https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/compare/ignore...jsoref:spelling?expand=1 and suggest a
series of commits that this project might like?

It is quite likely that someone will tell me that there are certain
types of changes that you don't want. That's fine, I'm happy to drop
changes. It's possible that I've chosen the wrong spelling correction
or made a mistake in my attempts, while the process of identifying
errant words is somewhat automated, the correction process is a mix of
me and some scripts, and neither of us are perfect.

The patch queue is currently sorted alphabetically, but it contains at least:
* branding corrections -- some of which may be wrong
* regional English -- I understand there's a discussion about this, I
can easily drop them, or you can choose to take them separately
* changelog changes -- I could understand not wanting to change the changelog
* local variable changes
* API changes -- hopefully the changes to functions/enums are within
private space and thus not a problem, but if you consider them to be
public, dropping them isn't a big deal
* changes to tests -- it wouldn't shock me if I messed some of these
up. Again, everything can be split/dropped/fixed if requested (within
limits -- I refuse to submit 100 emails with patches)
* changes to comments, lots of comments

Most changes are just changes to comments, and I'd hope it wouldn't be
terribly hard for them to be accepted.
A complete diff would be roughly 130k. I've recently tried to submit a
similarly sized patch to another project and it was stuck in
moderation (typically mailing lists limit attachments to around 40k).

I do not expect anyone to be able to do anything remotely useful with
such a patch. It is certainly possible for someone else to generate
such a file if they really like reading a diff in that manner.

For reference, I've split my proposal into 172 changes. Each change
should represent a single word/concept which has been misspelled
(possibly in multiple different manners). I understand that people
don't care about diffstats (I certainly don't), but for reference
collectively this encompasses 175 files and 305 lines.

Note that I've intentionally excluded certain files (by removing them
in prior commits), it's possible that changes would be needed to be
made to some of those files in order for tests to pass. If you have an
automated system for running tests (typically Travis or Appveyor), I'm
happy to submit changes to them before offering changes to a list. But
I couldn't find anything of the sort.

[1]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch
[2]: http://petereisentraut.blogspot.ca/2009/09/how-to-submit-patch-by-email.html
[3]: https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/compare/ignore...jsoref:spelling?expand=1

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#2Andres Freund
andres@anarazel.de
In reply to: Josh Soref (#1)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Hi,

On 2017-02-05 21:05:50 -0500, Josh Soref wrote:

Could someone please review the changes I have [3] and suggest a
series of commits that this project might like?

I think the current split seem excessive... I'd suggest splitting
things first into:
- straight up spelling/typo fixes in comments etc.
- straight up spelling/typo fixes in variable names etc
- straight up spelling/typo fixes that are API relevant
- the same split for stuff more dependenant on taste

Then afterwards we can see what's remaining.

A complete diff would be roughly 130k. I've recently tried to submit a
similarly sized patch to another project and it was stuck in
moderation (typically mailing lists limit attachments to around 40k).

IIRC 130k shouln't get you stuck in filters yet - if you're concerned
you can gzip the individual patches.

I understand that people
don't care about diffstats (I certainly don't), but for reference
collectively this encompasses 175 files and 305 lines.

FWIW, I do ;)

Greetings,

Andres Freund

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#3Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Andres Freund (#2)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

It's now split more or less to your suggestion:
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

Attachments:

postgres.comments.difftext/plain; charset=US-ASCII; name=postgres.comments.diffDownload+227-203
#4Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#3)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 02/06/2017 04:50 AM, Josh Soref wrote:

It's now split more or less to your suggestion:
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

Thanks!

I pushed most of these. Except for the below:

optimisation -> optimization et al.

Most of our code is written with the American spelling, but the British
spelling isn't wrong, so I don't want to go around changing them all.

NUL-terminated -> NULL-terminated

When we're talking about NUL-terminated strings, NUL refers to the NUL
ASCII character. NULL usually refers to a NULL pointer. We're probably
not consistent about this, but in this context, NUL-terminated isn't
wrong, so let's leave them as they are.

Ooops -> Oops

"Oops" is more idiomatic, but this doesn't really seem worth changing.
Maybe "Ooops" indicates a slightly bigger mistake than "oops" :-)

re-entrancy -> reentrancy

Googling around, I can see both spellings being used. "Re-entrancy"
actually feels more natural to me, although I'm not sure which is more
correct. Let's leave them as they are.

passthru -> passthrough

"Passthrough" is clearly the correct spelling (or "pass-through"?), but
"passthru" seems OK in the context, as an informal shorthand.

--- a/src/backend/tsearch/dict_thesaurus.c
+++ b/src/backend/tsearch/dict_thesaurus.c
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
/*
- * Temporay we use TSLexeme.flags for inner use...
+ * Temporary we use TSLexeme.flags for inner use...
*/
#define DT_USEASIS             0x1000

Looking at the code real quick, I couldn't understand the original
meaning of this. Is it:

* DT_USEASIS is a temporary value we use for something. For what?

* DT_USEASIS is used temporarily for something. Does this mean,
"temporarily" until we get around to write the code differently, or does
it happen temporarily at runtime, or what?

Just fixing the typo doesn't help much here, and I'm not sure if it
should be "temporary" or "temporarily" anyway.

--- a/contrib/spi/timetravel.c
+++ b/contrib/spi/timetravel.c
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ static EPlan *find_plan(char *ident, EPlan **eplan, int *nplans);
*                     and stop_date eq INFINITY [ and update_user eq current user ]
*                     and all other column values as in new tuple, and insert tuple
*                     with old data and stop_date eq current date
- *                     ELSE - skip updation of tuple.
+ *                     ELSE - skip UPDATE of tuple.
*             2.  IF a delete affects tuple with stop_date eq INFINITY
*                     then insert the same tuple with stop_date eq current date
*                     [ and delete_user eq current user ]

I wasn't sure if this changes the meaning of the comment slightly. An
"UPDATE" in all-caps refers to an UPDATE statement, is that what's meant
here? Or just updating a tuple, i.e. should this rather be "skip
updating of the tuple" or "skip update of tuple"?

--- a/src/test/regress/sql/errors.sql
+++ b/src/test/regress/sql/errors.sql
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
-- ERRORS
--
--- bad in postquel, but ok in postsql
+-- bad in postquel, but ok in PostgreSQL
select 1;

This "postsql" refers to the SQL dialect of PostgreSQL, rather than
PostgreSQL the project. I don't remember seeing it called "postsql"
anywhere else, though. We hardly care about what was an error in
postqual anyway, though, so perhaps this should be rewritten into
something else entirely, like "This is not allowed by the SQL standard,
but ok on PostgreSQL" (assuming that's correct, I'm not 100% sure). Or
just leave it alone.

Thanks for the fixes! I was particularly impressed that you caught the
typo in Marcel Kornacker's surname.

- Heikki

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#5Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Heikki Linnakangas (#4)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Heikki wrote:
‎> I pushed most of these. Except for the below:

optimisation -> optimization et al.

Most of our code is written with the American spelling,
but the British spelling isn't wrong,
so I don't want to go around changing them all.

Sure

As you'll see, my approach is to aim for consistency. If you used en-GB 99% of the time, I'd have offered a change to enforce that. I have a personal preference, but there's no obligation, and I understand the potential costs churn entails (I see you backported to branches). 

NUL-terminated -> NULL-terminated

When we're talking about NUL-terminated strings,
NUL refers to the NUL ASCII character. NULL usually refers to a NULL pointer.

This wasn't even in my original set (i.e. The dictionary I'm using didn't consider NUL to be misspelled). I ran across it while splitting comments out per Andres and figured I'd offer it as well. 

We're probably not consistent about this,

Hrm, I was going to say "that's correct, you aren't", but rereading, I realize that I'd have to review every instance in order to prove to myself that statement. I could make the weaker argument that "nul-terminated" should be changed to either NUL-terminated or null-terminated . My general approach is to only make changes when I can detect an inconsistency. And I generally tend toward "majority rule".

Here, I think the corpus has 4 spellings, and it sounds like it should only have two, but probably (NUL- and null-) not the two I picked (NULL- and null-). 

but in this context, NUL-terminated isn't wrong, so let's leave them as they are.

But that's OK. My goal in posting these is to encourage people to consider their code. 

Ooops -> Oops

"Oops" is more idiomatic, but this doesn't really seem worth changing.

Technically oops is in dictionaries whereas the other isn't, but I understood the intent. 

Maybe "Ooops" indicates a slightly bigger mistake than "oops" :-)

That seemed like the intent. It's certainly not unreasonable to retain it. It's also why I generally offer a queue, so people can reject families of changes. 

re-entrancy -> reentrancy

Googling around, I can see both spellings being used.

Both are used, but reentrancy is in most dictionaries (and encyclopedias) and is the form that's used in instruction (certainly it was when I studied in university, and it isn't likely to regress). It's akin to email vs e-mail. Once the dashless form becomes accepted (within a domain [1]), it's the correct form, and the other was merely transitional. 

"Re-entrancy" actually feels more natural to me, although I'm not sure which is more correct.
Let's leave them as they are.

Sure 

passthru -> passthrough

"Passthrough" is clearly the correct spelling (or "pass-through"?),

The former is also present in the codebase. (I didn't look for the latter, for the same reason as the previous note.)

but "passthru" seems OK in the context, as an informal shorthand.

My goal is consistency. If you always spell a concept a single way, then grepping for that concept is easier and more reliable. 

I personally recognize quite a few flavors, because they're usable for talking to Coverity / Purify. 

- * Temporay we use TSLexeme.flags for inner use...
+ * Temporary we use TSLexeme.flags for inner use...

Looking at the code real quick, I couldn't understand the original

meaning of this. Is it:

* DT_USEASIS is a temporary value we use for something. For what?
* DT_USEASIS is used temporarily for something.
Does this mean, "temporarily" until we get around to write the code differently, or does
it happen temporarily at runtime, or what?

Just fixing the typo doesn't help much here,
and I'm not sure if it should be "temporary" or "temporarily" anyway.

Apparently I didn't look at this one much at all. I believe temporarily is the intended word (fwiw, I originally mis-corrected directly as directory, that I did spot before submitting). And probably as a runtime concept. 

But I'm not volunteering to fix all comments in the project ;-). After spelling fixes, I'm more likely to try actual bugs / usability issues. I have a specific bug which bit me, but fixing that would require more effort than a spelling pass and more cooperation. I tend to do a spelling pass to determine if the more expensive activity is viable. So far, the project is welcoming :-) so, perhaps I'll manage to write the real fix...

I wasn't sure if this changes the meaning of the comment slightly.
An "UPDATE" in all-caps refers to an UPDATE statement,
is that what's meant here? Or just updating a tuple,
i.e. should this rather be "skip updating of the tuple" or "skip update of tuple"?

I'm not certain. I do understand that capital UPDATE is special. This one people more familiar with the project will have to resolve. 

Fwiw, if it's the former, you could omit the "of".

This "postsql" refers to the SQL dialect of PostgreSQL,

I had to look up the other dialect from that line to decide it wasn't a spelling error. 

rather than PostgreSQL the project.
I don't remember seeing it called "postsql" anywhere else, though.

Nothing within the corpus I was changing shared that spelling, otherwise it too would have been changed :) 

Oddly, this specific thing feels like a Deja-vu. I wonder if I started a spelling fix series for Postgres a decade ago or something...

We hardly care about what was an error in postqual anyway,
though, so perhaps this should be rewritten into something else entirely,
like "This is not allowed by the SQL standard, but ok on PostgreSQL"
(assuming that's correct, I'm not 100% sure).
Or just leave it alone.

I'd encourage you to find something that's meaningful and correct. 

Thanks for the fixes!

  
You're welcome.

Thanks for the quick handling. Some projects take months. Or never respond.

I was particularly impressed that you caught the typo in Marcel Kornacker's surname.

My tools identify both spellings as incorrect (and all possibly misspelled words are listed alphabetically), which means that I have the opportunity to choose a correct spelling -- generally I'll Google if I'm concerned because there is insufficient preference within a corpus.

Did you want me to submit emails for the remaining portions from 
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

 [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reentrant

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#6Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#5)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 02/06/2017 12:52 PM, Josh Soref wrote:

Did you want me to submit emails for the remaining portions from
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

Ah, yes please. Post them over and I'll have a look at those as well.

- Heikki

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#7Alvaro Herrera
alvherre@2ndquadrant.com
In reply to: Andres Freund (#2)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Andres Freund wrote:

On 2017-02-05 21:05:50 -0500, Josh Soref wrote:

A complete diff would be roughly 130k. I've recently tried to submit a
similarly sized patch to another project and it was stuck in
moderation (typically mailing lists limit attachments to around 40k).

IIRC 130k shouln't get you stuck in filters yet - if you're concerned
you can gzip the individual patches.

Our limit for pgsql-hackers is 1 MB.

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#8Piotr Stefaniak
postgres@piotr-stefaniak.me
In reply to: Heikki Linnakangas (#4)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 2017-02-06 10:40, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

On 02/06/2017 04:50 AM, Josh Soref wrote:

NUL-terminated -> NULL-terminated

When we're talking about NUL-terminated strings, NUL refers to the NUL
ASCII character. NULL usually refers to a NULL pointer. We're probably
not consistent about this, but in this context, NUL-terminated isn't
wrong, so let's leave them as they are.

The C standard talks about how "a byte with all bits set to 0, called
the null character" is used to "terminate a character string"; it
mentions '\0' as "commonly used to represent the null character"; and it
also talks about when snprintf() produces "null-terminated output".

It never mentions ASCII in this context; quite intentionally it avoids
assuming ASCII at all, so that a standard-compliant C implementation may
co-exist with other encodings (like EBCDIC).

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#9Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Heikki Linnakangas (#6)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Attachments:

postgres.strings.difftext/plain; charset=US-ASCII; name=postgres.strings.diffDownload+29-29
#10Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#9)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Attachments:

postgres.variables.difftext/plain; charset=US-ASCII; name=postgres.variables.diffDownload+34-34
#11Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#10)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Attachments:

postgres.misc.difftext/plain; charset=US-ASCII; name=postgres.misc.diffDownload+16-16
#12Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#11)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Attachments:

postgres.api.difftext/plain; charset=US-ASCII; name=postgres.api.diffDownload+14-14
#13Peter Eisentraut
peter_e@gmx.net
In reply to: Heikki Linnakangas (#6)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 2/6/17 06:03, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

On 02/06/2017 12:52 PM, Josh Soref wrote:

Did you want me to submit emails for the remaining portions from
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

Ah, yes please. Post them over and I'll have a look at those as well.

This thread is in the commit fest, but I think there is no current patch.

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#14Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Peter Eisentraut (#13)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On Mar 1, 2017 9:06 AM, "Peter Eisentraut" <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>
wrote:

On 2/6/17 06:03, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

Ah, yes please. Post them over and I'll have a look at those as well.

This thread is in the commit fest, but I think there is no current patch.

I sent email on the 6th with a number of patches as attachments...

#15Alvaro Herrera
alvherre@2ndquadrant.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#12)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Josh Soref wrote:

-	else if (ControlFile->state == DB_SHUTDOWNING)
+	else if (ControlFile->state == DB_SHUTTINGDOWN)

SHUTDOWNING and SHUTDOWNED are typos first introduced by hacker emeritus
Vadim Mikheev in 1999 together with WAL, commit 47937403676d. It goes
to show that not every PG hacker is a learned English speaker. I see no
reason to change the spelling.

-	List	   *epq_arowmarks;
+	List	   *epq_arowMarks;

I'd not change this one either. Of the large set of words run together
in our source, this is one of the easiest ones to read.

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#16Alvaro Herrera
alvherre@2ndquadrant.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#9)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

Josh Soref wrote:

<!--
2016-04-08 [848ef42bb] Add the "snapshot too old" feature
-2016-05-06 [2cc41acd8] Fix hash index vs "snapshot too old" problemms
+2016-05-06 [2cc41acd8] Fix hash index vs "snapshot too old" problems
2016-05-06 [7e3da1c47] Mitigate "snapshot too old" performance regression on NU
2016-08-03 [3e2f3c2e4] Prevent "snapshot too old" from trying to return pruned
2016-08-07 [9ee1cf04a] Fix TOAST access failure in RETURNING queries.

Note that these SGML comment lines are references to git commits, so the
typos are present in the commit messages. These should not be changed.

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#17David Rowley
dgrowleyml@gmail.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#3)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 6 February 2017 at 15:50, Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com> wrote:

It's now split more or less to your suggestion:
https://github.com/jsoref/postgres/commits/spelling

- * Note that this algrithm is know to not be very effective (O(N^2))
+ * Note that this algorithm is know to not be very effective (O(N^2))

know should be known. Perhaps you can include if you have a followup patch.

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#18Peter Eisentraut
peter_e@gmx.net
In reply to: Josh Soref (#14)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

On 3/1/17 09:12, Josh Soref wrote:

On Mar 1, 2017 9:06 AM, "Peter Eisentraut"
<peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com
<mailto:peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>> wrote:

On 2/6/17 06:03, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

Ah, yes please. Post them over and I'll have a look at those as well.

This thread is in the commit fest, but I think there is no current
patch.

I sent email on the 6th with a number of patches as attachments...

Yes, some of that was committed, and some comments were offered. If
there is more to do, please send a rebased patch set.

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#19Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Alvaro Herrera (#15)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

I can easily drop the shutdown* items;

The reason for rowMarks is consistency with lr_arowMarks.

I'll tentatively exclude that from any resubmission I make tonight...

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#20Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Alvaro Herrera (#16)
Re: Possible spelling fixes

I understood that they were git commits. I could have excluded the
file but opted not to in case people were willing to take a small
drift -- the SHAs are what someone needs to review the commit, and
personally, I'd rather read something without typos than with --
especially in a summary. But, I'll tentatively exclude the lines
containing SHAs.

do you want:
@@ -3116,7 +3116,7 @@ 2016-02-17 [a5c43b886] Add new system vi

        <para>
         This view exposes the same information available from
-        the <application>pg_config</> comand-line utility,
+        the <application>pg_config</> command-line utility,
         namely assorted compile-time configuration information for
         <productname>PostgreSQL</>.
        </para>

or should I exclude the file entirely?

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#21Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: David Rowley (#17)
#22Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Peter Eisentraut (#18)
#23Alvaro Herrera
alvherre@2ndquadrant.com
In reply to: Josh Soref (#22)
#24Andres Freund
andres@anarazel.de
In reply to: Alvaro Herrera (#23)
#25Josh Soref
jsoref@gmail.com
In reply to: Andres Freund (#24)