From: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Message-Id: <200609020209.k8229or12099@momjian.us>
Subject: Re: Getting a move on for 8.2 beta
In-Reply-To: <200609020358.04852.peter_e@gmx.net>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 22:09:50 -0400 (EDT)
CC: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	josh@agliodbs.com
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Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Uh, Tom has been tracking Gavin on the bitmap patch every week for
> > weeks, and I pummelled EnterpriseDB/Jonah over the recursive query
> > patch.
> 
> Great, but where is this documented, so others know about this?

I see no value in documenting it.

> > Neither effort was very fruitful, but tracking wasn't what 
> > made them fail.  I am not saying tracking is wrong, but rather
> > tracking would not have helped make these things happen faster.
> 
> The fallacy here is assuming that all these things should be 
> single-person tasks.  As long as we only have one coder and 
> one "manager", we don't need much process support, but then we're 
> pretty nearly at the point we're now, where two or three people review 
> patches while the rest just sits around and wonders what this feature 
> freeze thing is supposed to be about.
> 
> I can tell you plenty of stories about the updatable views patch.  One 
> month after feature freeze, we notice that we didn't even have an 
> accepted design specification.  I'm sure it was posted sometime, but 
> how do we find it now?  People complain unjustly that the patch was 
> posted at the last minute, but in fact updated patches and information 
> have been posted regularly for more than one year.  But it's impossible 
> to tie these things together unless you are mailing list crawling 
> software with artificial intelligence capabilities.  And during the 
> last two weeks, no make that six months, Bernd has spent half his time 
> analyzing and reverting breakage that well-meaning reviewers had 
> injected into his patch, with the other half possibly spent keeping the 
> patch up to date with the moving development tree.
> 
> There is, of course, no silver bullet.  But more successful involvement 
> of people who are not in the inner circle needs more support in many 
> ways.

I do things only if others do not.  If committers applied patches as
they came in, the patch queue would be empty, and if others tracked open
issues, I wouldn't have to.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +