Re: pgsql: doc: fix wording describing the checkpoint_flush_after GUC

Hi,

On 2023-11-14 17:49:59 +0100, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> 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/155208475619.1380.12815553062985622271@wrigleys.postgresql.org
> [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/60285

Hm, I really can't get excited about this. To me the "you" sounds worse, but
whatever...

> > 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 ...

That works for me!

Greetings,

Andres Freund