Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2022 13:22:56 -0500
From: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Dipesh Pandit <dipesh.pandit@gmail.com>,
	Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
	Jeevan Ladhe <jeevanladhe.os@gmail.com>,
	Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>,
	"Shinoda, Noriyoshi (PN Japan FSIP)" <noriyoshi.shinoda@hpe.com>,
	Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@toroid.org>,
	Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>,
	Jeevan Ladhe <jeevan.ladhe@enterprisedb.com>,
	Mark Dilger <mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com>,
	pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org,
	tushar <tushar.ahuja@enterprisedb.com>
Subject: Re: refactoring basebackup.c (zstd workers)
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On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 12:57:36PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > typo: contain a an
> I searched for the "contain a an" typo that you mentioned but was not able to
> find it. Can you give me a more specific pointer?

Here:

+ * during parsing, and will otherwise contain a an appropriate error message.

> I looked a little bit more at the compression method vs. compression
> algorithm thing. I agree that there is some inconsistency in
> terminology here, but I'm still not sure that we are well-served by
> trying to make it totally uniform, especially if we pick the word
> "method" as the standard rather than "algorithm". In my opinion,
> "method" is less specific than "algorithm". If someone asks me to
> choose a compression algorithm, I know that I should give an answer
> like "lz4" or "zstd". If they ask me to pick a compression method, I'm
> not quite sure whether they want that kind of answer or whether they
> want something more detailed, like "use lz4 with compression level 3
> and a 1MB block size". After all, that is (at least according to my
> understanding of how English works) a perfectly valid answer to the
> question "what method should I use to compress this data?" -- but not
> to the question "what algorithm should I use to compress this data?".
> The latter can ONLY be properly answered by saying something like
> "lz4". And I think that's really the root of my hesitation to make the
> kinds of changes you want here.

I think "algorithm" could be much more nuanced than "lz4", but I also think
we've spent more than enough time on it now :)

-- 
Justin