Re: Getting a move on for 8.2 beta

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?

> 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.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/