Subject: Re: Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2

From: "Magnus Hagander" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 09:56:49 +0100

> > Josh, in your original mail you said that there were 
> companies willing 
> > to put resources behind such a project. Does this mean that 
> they will 
> > dedicate staff time to the *continous maintaining of such a site in 
> > the future*, or just that they're interested in getting it started?
> 
> In theory, I would think that if done properly, the community 
> should be able to sustain things once the seed has been 
> created ... no?

Certainly - given that it integrates with existing stuff and doesn't
place a lot of additional technical maintenance burden on the community.
If that's included in yuor "done properly", it's not a problem. It's
clearly not in everybodys "done properly", though, in which case it
becomes a problem.

> > Because frankly, we clearly don't have enough people to 
> maintain what 
> > we have *today* (if we did, someone wouldn't have been able to hack 
> > into our server through a piece of software that wasn't properly 
> > updated). If we're going to add more to it, there'd better be some 
> > committment behind it for actual maintenance.
> 
> In Josh's defence on this one ... you give him a pretty 
> strong argument why this can't be community built, but has to 
> be done by a corporate "group" ... manpower.

No. If it's built inside current frameworks, it does *not* add a
considerable maintenance burden, then we can deal with it. If it also
gets rid of other maintenance stuff (techdocs), it will *decrease* the
maintenance burden.
Note that I'm talking about technical maintenance, *not* content
maintenance. Those are different things, and it's significantly easier
to scale content maintenance.

And if you're not talking aobut integrated stuff, you're back to your
argument about a non-community KB. Which I don't think is what Josh
intends at all.

> We had this thread/discussion several months back about 
> implementing a replacement for techdocs/KB ... but, to date, 
> has anything been done?  The feel I've gotten is that 
> everything was resting on 'Gevik' for this, so that became 
> our single point of failure ...

Not at all. Work is progressing as we speak, and has for a while (though
it was temporarily interrupted when Gevik was working on it the first
time - before taking the timeout).

But this is *just a techdocs replacement*, not a whizz-bang KB. It
fulfills the techdocs requirements for easy editing and searching, and
the communitys erquirements for easy maintenance. It does not fullfill
all the other KB requiremetns (I'm sure, though I haven't seen teh whole
list since it's not finished - but there are definitly several that
aren't). It places the bar a lot lower, making it easier to get done...

No, there's still no ETA on it, but it shouldn't be too far off. The
hardest part tends to be figuring out how the CSS stuff on our site is
actually meant to work, because there are no docs about that.

//Magnus

---

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 09:16:59 -0800

Magnus,

> aren't). It places the bar a lot lower, making it easier to get done...

Hmmm ... well, any good KB should subsume techdocs as one aspect of its 
functionality.   I don't like to see duplicated effort if we can help it.   
Heck, for the much-maligned corporate KB effort step #2 will be evaluating 
existing KB projects to see if any of them meets requirements or can be made 
to with a minimum of effort.    And even if we do something custom it will 
probably be based on GreenPlum's custom KB I'm currently building (in PHP & 
PL/pgSQL).

On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you if you thought that the latest KB 
effort was liable to founder and die and that you needed to have a back-up.  
It wouldn't be the first one.  But in that case I'd suggest looking at 
adapting something existing (like Bricolage, Framewerk, Drupal, etc.) rather 
than coding up from scratch.  If you keep your requirements simple, at least 
one of these should suffice, and has the tremendous advantage of having 
external code maintainence, documentation, and help.

> We're not against it. I think the irkness (sp? :-):-) ) comes from the fact
> that the ongoing project (Gevik had been regularly demo'ing his
> progress) was essentially ripped out from here without our knowledge and
> reformed on a pgFoundry site, 

Ah, Kennisgres was put up months ago (like, August).  I'd no idea that Gevik 
hadn't discussed it here.   I can see that that would be a rude shock.

> and was about to be re-specced possibly in 
> complete contradition to what we had originally thrashed out - without
> so much as a 'by your leave'.

Well, unfortunately no spec document ever came out of dicussion on this list.  
In fact, I was on this list for that discussion, and my recall of it is that 
there was a lot of shooting the breeze but no real decisions were actually 
made.  At least, nothing that had a consensus behind it. 

One of the big issues -- in fact, THE big issue -- with increasing 
participation in WWW administration is the total and complete lack of 
documentation for any WWW decisions, infrastructure, or code.  While I can 
understand lagging in documenting stuff (like, I have a draft of the release 
PR procedure I have yet to discuss online despite being on my HDD for a 
month), it's extremely irrational for people on this list to pitch a fit at 
potential contributors for not psychically understanding what WWW wants or 
not reading the WWW list back to the beginning of time.

That is, it's one thing to say: "Hey, you should probably read this thread, we 
already discussed it here ____________", and another thing entirely to say 
"You asshole!  We already decided that, why didn't you pay attention!"   
Currently, this list has an awful lot of the former.

This isn't just the KB.  It affects the whole web infrastructure.  For 
example, we've been running on the new web site code for almost 2 years, and 
how many translations of the site have there been?   Exactly none.  Why?  
Zero documentation on how to translate the site.

If our project can insist that all database code patches come with full 
documentation, I think maybe it's time that we start insisting that all WWW 
patches come with documentation.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

---

From: "Gevik babakhani" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 19:43:41 +0100

Well excuse me for trying to organize a home for whatever experimentations I
was doing for the KB. Maybe it was better to not have been enthusiastic and
certainly not to have shown *ideas* and *concepts* which have raised all
kinds questions and irritations on people.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:pgsql-www-
> [email-masked]] On Behalf Of Josh Berkus
> Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 6:17 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: Magnus Hagander; Marc G. Fournier
> Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2
> 
> Magnus,
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
>        choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
>        match

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 11:03:44 -0800

> kinds questions and irritations on people.

I don't think anyone was questioning what you are doing Gevik. Don't
take it personally. I think that this whole thing has been just one big
misscommunication.

At this point it should be dropped in favor of being productive. The
direction in terms of initial development have been decided, they will
take place in the kennisgres project mailing lists on the PostgreSQL
Projects, PgFoundry server.

After that we can all come back and fight and argue about all the things
that he said, that she said, that I said, that you said. That way we can
waste even more time.

Joshua D. Drake

> TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
-- 
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.503.667.4564
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---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:36:19 +0000

> Well, unfortunately no spec document ever came out of dicussion on this list.

I've never seen a spec document produced for anything that postgresql.org
has done, on the web side or the backend server. I'm sure some (maybe all)
of the companies involved might produce them for things they work on, but I
never saw anything on -hackers.
 
> made.  At least, nothing that had a consensus behind it.

Hmm, last week you told me you didn't recall any discussions on the subject
at all.
 
> not reading the WWW list back to the beginning of time.

That is not the issue. Whilst you may have forgotten the discussions, others
were most certainly aware of the ongoing project that had evolved from them.
*That* is the issue, not the detail, which I'm happy to summarise as
required.
 
> Currently, this list has an awful lot of the former.

Eh? You want us to do the latter, or is that a typo? If it is a typo, then
I'd like to see where any of us have been downright rude about it as you
suggest.
 
> Zero documentation on how to translate the site.

No. Alexey wrote up the details and added them to CVS (I think at your
request, but I might be mistaken about that). I can certainly recall at
least a couple of occasions where we've pointed you at that doc when you've
asked about it over the last year. Oh, and it's less than a year, not nearly
2 - I know that because we pushed it live just after new year so it was
there for 8.0's release.
 
> patches come with documentation.

No problem with that - though it will be documentation through code
comments. It's not like we require docs on how the code works for anything
else, only for the end user functionality.

Regards, Dave

---

From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 19:25:29 -0400 (AST)

> kinds questions and irritations on people.

Gevik ... actually, from reading through this whole thread, you were one 
of the ones that was actually doing it all properly, keeping -www in the 
loop ... definitely please keep it up ...

>> patches come with documentation.

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: [email-masked]           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

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From: "Jim C. Nasby" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 18:57:11 -0600

> never saw anything on -hackers.

This is something that may end up changing over time. Companies
generally want to know how large a project is going to be (read as: what
it's going to cost) before they commit to it, and that generally means
having both some kind of requirements doc and design doc.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      [email-masked]
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461