Crash during WAL recovery?

Is there any particular reason the spelling and punctuation in the code
snippet below is so bad?

Chris

At 09:14 AM 11/22/00 +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

Is there any particular reason the spelling and punctuation in the code
snippet below is so bad?

Vadim's Russian. This impacts his english but not his ability to implement
complex features like MVCC and WAL :)

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest
Rare Bird Alert Service and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net.

Is there any particular reason the spelling and punctuation

in the code

snippet below is so bad?

Vadim's Russian. This impacts his english but not his
ability to implement complex features like MVCC and WAL :)

Yes, sorry guys. C lang is much easier -:))

Vadim

Just speaking Russian and English both (to any degree) is absolutely
amazing, put that on top of MVCC and WAL and we have Vadim, the smartest
person alive! *grin*

-Mitch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mikheev, Vadim" <vmikheev@SECTORBASE.COM>
To: "'Don Baccus'" <dhogaza@pacifier.com>; "Christopher Kings-Lynne"
<chriskl@familyhealth.com.au>; "PostgreSQL Development"
<pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 5:37 PM
Subject: RE: [HACKERS] Crash during WAL recovery?

Is there any particular reason the spelling and punctuation in the code
snippet below is so bad?

Vadim's Russian. This impacts his english but not his ability to implement
complex features like MVCC and WAL :)

As someone who can't speak anything but English worth a damn (even
though I was raised in Spanish-speaking countries, so you'd think
I'd have acquired at least one clue), I have long since learned not
to criticize the English of non-native speakers. Many of the
participants in this project are doing far better than I would if
the tables were turned. So, I fix grammatical and spelling errors
if I have another reason to be editing some piece of documentation,
but I never hold it against the original author.

More generally, a lot of the PG documentation could use the attention
of a professional copy editor --- and I'm sad to say that the parts
contributed by native English speakers aren't necessarily any cleaner
than the parts contributed by those who are not. If you have the
time and energy to submit corrections, please fall to!

regards, tom lane

As someone who can't speak anything but English worth a damn (even
though I was raised in Spanish-speaking countries, so you'd think
I'd have acquired at least one clue), I have long since learned not
to criticize the English of non-native speakers. Many of the
participants in this project are doing far better than I would if
the tables were turned. So, I fix grammatical and spelling errors
if I have another reason to be editing some piece of documentation,
but I never hold it against the original author.

More generally, a lot of the PG documentation could use the attention
of a professional copy editor --- and I'm sad to say that the parts
contributed by native English speakers aren't necessarily any cleaner
than the parts contributed by those who are not. If you have the
time and energy to submit corrections, please fall to!

I did have AW's copyeditor go through the refence manual. Would be nice
if they had done the other manuals too.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

At 12:29 AM 11/22/00 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:

Is there any particular reason the spelling and punctuation in the code
snippet below is so bad?

Vadim's Russian. This impacts his english but not his ability to implement
complex features like MVCC and WAL :)

As someone who can't speak anything but English worth a damn (even
though I was raised in Spanish-speaking countries, so you'd think
I'd have acquired at least one clue), I have long since learned not
to criticize the English of non-native speakers.

I think it's certain that the original poster didn't realize Vadim is not
a native English speaker, which is why I made my comment (to clue him in).
Vadim didn't take my comment as criticism, as his follow-on post made clear
(he got the joke). I don't know from your post if you thought I was adding
to the criticism or not, but I can say with certainty I wasn't. In my
previous life as the founder of a company specializing in optimizing
compilers for minicomputers, I employed Dutch (who spoke and wrote English
than I or anyone here), Polish, Vietmanese and other nationals who were
excellent hackers and who all spoke better English than I spoke their
language - or cooked their cuisine or even followed their table customs,
for that matter.

More generally, a lot of the PG documentation could use the attention
of a professional copy editor --- and I'm sad to say that the parts
contributed by native English speakers aren't necessarily any cleaner
than the parts contributed by those who are not. If you have the
time and energy to submit corrections, please fall to!

This is very much true. PG needs some good documentation volunteers.
I'm not denigrating the current efforts, because PG documention's pretty
good all things considered. But some volunteers devoted to improving
the docs could accomplish a lot.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest
Rare Bird Alert Service and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net.

I don't know from your post if you thought I was adding
to the criticism or not, but I can say with certainty I wasn't.

No, I saw that you understood perfectly, I just wanted to add another
two cents...

I'm not denigrating the current efforts, because PG documention's pretty
good all things considered. But some volunteers devoted to improving
the docs could accomplish a lot.

Yup. Anyone out there with the time and interest?

regards, tom lane

I think it's certain that the original poster didn't realize Vadim is not
a native English speaker, which is why I made my comment (to clue him in).
Vadim didn't take my comment as criticism, as his follow-on post
made clear
(he got the joke). I don't know from your post if you thought I
was adding
to the criticism or not, but I can say with certainty I wasn't. In my
previous life as the founder of a company specializing in optimizing
compilers for minicomputers, I employed Dutch (who spoke and wrote English
than I or anyone here), Polish, Vietmanese and other nationals who were
excellent hackers and who all spoke better English than I spoke their
language - or cooked their cuisine or even followed their table customs,
for that matter.

Just for the record, I apologise for criticising Valim's grammar. I didn't
realise that he was a non-native speaker - nor that it was even his code. I
just thought I should point out that spelling error (propably) given that
there was a thread going on about spelling in some error messages...

Chris

On Wednesday 22 November 2000 00:54, Tom Lane wrote:

I don't know from your post if you thought I was adding
to the criticism or not, but I can say with certainty I wasn't.

No, I saw that you understood perfectly, I just wanted to add another
two cents...

I'm not denigrating the current efforts, because PG documention's pretty
good all things considered. But some volunteers devoted to improving
the docs could accomplish a lot.

Yup. Anyone out there with the time and interest?

regards, tom lane

I might be interested in helping with it. Whats involved (DocBook, SGML)?

--
-------- Robert B. Easter reaster@comptechnews.com ---------
- CompTechNews Message Board http://www.comptechnews.com/ -
- CompTechServ Tech Services http://www.comptechserv.com/ -
---------- http://www.comptechnews.com/~reaster/ ------------

I might be interested in helping with it. Whats involved (DocBook, SGML)?

Yup. The PostgreSQL source tree has a docs directory with all of the
sources for the docs. I use emacs for editing, and several other options
are discussed in the appendix on documentation in the doc set.

- Thomas

Tom Lane wrote:

More generally, a lot of the PG documentation could use the attention
of a professional copy editor --- and I'm sad to say that the parts
contributed by native English speakers aren't necessarily any cleaner
than the parts contributed by those who are not.

The difference between native English speaker and English writer is that
writer usually does not mix up dye and die ;)

But afaik there is no such language as Englis, so first we would need to
agree on which of the many Englishes the docs will be in.

I guess they are currently in "International" English which is quite
free
about grammar, spelling and punctuation.

I would hate if we all started to write in some more rigid dialect.

I've heard that some of these even make you put the full stop at the end
of a
sentence before closing parenthesiss (like this.)

They claim it is for "typographical aesthetics" ;)

----------
Hannu

On Wednesday 22 November 2000 02:36, Don Baccus wrote:

More generally, a lot of the PG documentation could use the attention
of a professional copy editor --- and I'm sad to say that the parts
contributed by native English speakers aren't necessarily any cleaner
than the parts contributed by those who are not. If you have the
time and energy to submit corrections, please fall to!

This is very much true. PG needs some good documentation volunteers.
I'm not denigrating the current efforts, because PG documention's pretty
good all things considered. But some volunteers devoted to improving
the docs could accomplish a lot.

It would be a pleasure to help with the spanish docs, if any help is needed.

Saludos... :-)

--
"And I'm happy, because you make me feel good, about me." - Melvin Udall
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Santa Fe - Argentina http://math.unl.edu.ar/~martin/
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It would be a pleasure to help with the spanish docs, if any help is needed.

There is a documentation translation effort hosted in Spain, and I'm
sure that they would welcome help to stay current (I believe that a
substantial portion of docs are already done for a recent, but perhaps
not current, set of docs). There should be a link to this from the
postgresql.org site.

- Thomas

Hello,

Before the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US I had been following with
great interest the thread regarding Vadim's English and the postgres docs.
Since this was posted about 200 messages ago, I replied as a new thread... I
hope you don't mind!

I am interested in volunteering some time to helping with the documentation
if the developers feel that I could be of service. I am not a C coder,
although I do a lot of CGI programming in PHP and Perl. Mostly I am a
database and Unix systems administrator for Combimatrix, a biotech company
near Seattle, Washington. Although I'm not a technical writer, I have some
background in writing, having been an English composition instructor at the
University of Connecticut and a Spanish and Linguistics major in college
before that.

I'm fairly new to Postgres, but for the last two months I have been helping
develop applications in Java and PHP that rely on it, and have become by and
large comfortable with it. I had used MySQL for most of my work over the last
two years and now find myself wondering how I ever got anything done.

Please, no one should take this the wrong way, but despite its lack of
important features relative to Postgres, I very much enjoyed working with
MySQL in large part because of its nicely organized and constantly updated
documentation. Quite honestly this is the one area where Postgres still needs
to catch up, and if there's any way at all I can help make that happen I
would like to be involved.

So, if you think I can be of any service, please let me know.

Best regards,

Norm

So, if you think I can be of any service, please let me know.

We already know that you can be of service :)

There are two ways to go about this:

1) pick something in the docs to fix. A topic, or organization, or
whatever you think is a good candidate for improvement or inclusion. Run
big changes by the -hackers or -docs mailing list to make sure you have
a consensus that the change is desirable, then go do it! Small changes
such as wording fixes can just be done and submitted as patches without
needing a peer review or consensus imho.

2) fix something that someone else thinks should be fixed. Same process
as before, and you might end up solving something bugging the rest of us
for a long time. But maybe less satisfying for you than (1) might be.

Either works. This list is never short of suggestions if you want to try
(2).

Welcome!

- Thomas

Norman Clarke writes:

I am interested in volunteering some time to helping with the documentation

Good. Not sure exactly what you want to do, but we need help in just
about every area, including proof-reading/copy-editing sort of stuff,
markup/consistency improvements, verification of examples, trying out the
outlined procedures from the point of view of a na�ve user, rewriting old
stuff, documenting new stuff, etc.

Since we're going beta any minute now the primary focus would currently be
on getting everything completed and updated, rather than undertaking major
rewrites.

The Developer's Guide which should be found at or near
www.postgresql.org/devel-corner/docs has an appendix that explains how the
documentation is handled. Contributions are accepted even if you don't
completely understand DocBook or don't want to bother installing the
tools. (OTOH, it's very rewarding to have installed the tools and to have
understood DocBook. :-))

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://yi.org/peter-e/