Re: PostgreSQL 8.4 development plan

On Friday 08 February 2008 00:52:04 Gregory Stark wrote:

> Well not really. Our current model is that only stuff that's ready for
> widespread use goes into CVS. That means "everything" isn't open and shared
> at all. "everything" is mostly sitting on people's local hard drives where
> you can't use do anything with it, let alone contribute.
>
> The patches mailing list is basically our poor-man's distributed SCM today.
> It's awful since a) you never know if you're looking at the most recent
> version b) updating your tree from an old version to a newer version is
> painful c) people only release versions when they think they have something
> to say or a question; they don't know you want to try out their stuff until
> you complain about last month's silly bugs d) you never know what version
> of the tree the patch was against and of course e) if you make any changes
> they have all the same problems dealing with your changes to their patch.
>
> And it's hardly any more centralized than a distributed SCM system would
> be.

One of the things I would like to see in the project is more modularisation
during development . In particular, it may be useful to allow different
maintainers to look after different parts of the backend, much in the way
that different linux kernel developers are in charge of different subsystems.

This strikes me as being advantageous in a couple of ways:

i) It lowers the bar for entry into the project. Knowing the ins and outs of
one subsystem is going to take a developer much less time than it does to
learn about the entire backend.

ii) Some of the larger patches we have seen during 8.3 would be broken into
smaller chunks based upon the part of the backend they touch; so reviewing 3
or 4 smaller incremental patches across 3 or 4 people will take much less
time than having to wait for someone like Alvaro or Tom to review and commit
several hundred KB of code.

This seems to fit more with the idea of a distributed SCM, although it
wouldn't be entirely out of the question to set up permissions using CVS/SVN.

ATB,

Mark.

--
Mark Cave-Ayland
Sirius Corporation - The Open Source Experts
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
T: +44 870 608 0063