Re: Getting a move on for 8.2 beta

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(at)momjian(dot)us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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