Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> What makes you think this isn't possible to run pgindent?
I have to say, I've been rather mystified by the difficulty
attributed to running pgindent. During work on the SSI patch, I ran
it about once every two weeks on files involved in the patch, just so
that it would be easier to review by people used to that format. I
also tried to keep src/tools/pgindent/typedefs.list up to date with
new structures, so that my runs were good. Granted, when the
official run was done there were a few adjustments to typedefs.list,
and some comments which were added after the commit of the main part
of the patch hadn't yet been wrapped to the right line length, but on
the whole I didn't find it a big deal to stay relatively close by
doing periodic runs. Maybe three minutes every two weeks.
When people talk like it's hugely difficult or hard to understand, I
wonder if they have actually made the attempt. When someone is eager
for feedback on a patch, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to ask
them to read the README for pgindent and try to generate a patch with
conforming results.
Now, the other aspect to this whole discussion is that people often
have code they have developed for academic purposes or for their own
use which they want to offer to the community "FWIW", and I think we
sometimes miss an opportunity to take advantage of someone else's
work because of an assumption that they have some vested interest in
it's acceptance. The fact that someone doesn't care enough to try to
work with the community to get their patch accepted doesn't *always*
mean that we're better off for ignoring that patch. Maybe that's
true 90% of the time or better, but it seems to me that sometimes our
community is a bit provincial.
And I can't help but wonder why, in an off-list discussion with
Michael Cahill about the SSI technology he commented that he was
originally intending to implement the technique in PostgreSQL, but
later chose Oracle Berkeley DB and then latter InnoDB instead.
*Maybe* he was looking toward being hired by Oracle, and *maybe* it
was because the other databases already had predicate locking and
true serializable transaction isolation levels -- but was part of it
the reputation of the community? I keep wondering.
-Kevin