Re: How about closing some Open Items?

All,

Selena (and others) have done a terrific job on the Open Items list for
9.0.:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.0_Open_Items

However, I haven't see much progress in the last 10 days on closing any
of these issues, and quite a few people have moved on to 9.1 features.

If you are the author of a feature for 9.0, please examine the open
items list ASAP and close any issues associated with your feature! If
you are a hacker, please do what you can to fix bugs.

Let's get 9.0 out the door, hey?

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> Let's get 9.0 out the door, hey?

What we actually need is some testing effort. The lack of bug reports
against Hot Standby, in particular, is proof positive that no meaningful
testing is happening. (If you think it means HS is bug-free, I have a
nice bridge I'd like to interest you in.)

regards, tom lane

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> However, I haven't see much progress in the last 10 days on closing any
> of these issues, and quite a few people have moved on to 9.1 features.

I appreciate the effort that went into making this list, but it's not
very useful to work off of any more. The problem is that the set of
things that is listed here is pretty erratic - there are actual
problems that are not on this list, and there are things on this list
that are 100% unimportant. In particular, pretty much everything in
the docs section is crap. Just because two people discussed something
at some point in the last six months doesn't make it an open issue.
Most of those conversations were not pursued because they were not
deemed important enough to pursuing, and I think only one of them has
an actual patch associated with it, viz:

ALTER TABLE .. DISABLE/ENABLE TRIGGER are out of date

I took a look at that patch, and I expect it's probably correct, but I
haven't actually looked at the code to verify that it's correct, so I
didn't apply it.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

On 6/8/10 2:01 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> I appreciate the effort that went into making this list, but it's not
> very useful to work off of any more. The problem is that the set of
> things that is listed here is pretty erratic - there are actual
> problems that are not on this list, and there are things on this list
> that are 100% unimportant.

So? Improve the quality of the list then. Bashing the quality of
another community member's efforts is not at all helpful, and certainly
does nothing to move us towards 9.0.

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com

On Tue, Jun 08, 2010 at 03:46:06PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> > Let's get 9.0 out the door, hey?
>
> What we actually need is some testing effort. The lack of bug
> reports against Hot Standby, in particular, is proof positive that
> no meaningful testing is happening. (If you think it means HS is

s/HS/any software, no matter how trivial/

> bug-free, I have a nice bridge I'd like to interest you in.)

Is it the one from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn? I've got all kinds of
cool ideas about what to do with it...

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com
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Remember to vote!
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On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> On 6/8/10 2:01 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> I appreciate the effort that went into making this list, but it's not
>> very useful to work off of any more.  The problem is that the set of
>> things that is listed here is pretty erratic - there are actual
>> problems that are not on this list, and there are things on this list
>> that are 100% unimportant.
>
> So?  Improve the quality of the list then.  Bashing the quality of
> another community member's efforts is not at all helpful, and certainly
> does nothing to move us towards 9.0.

Whoa, there. There is not any way of moving forward with this list
without explaining why the list in its present form is not too useful.
If I simply start overhauling the list without explaining what I
perceive to be the systematic problems with it, then I will get yelled
at for failing to follow community process. On the other hand, if I
point out the problem, apparently that's bashing another community
member. I attempted to avoid that pitfall by saying "I appreciate the
effort that went into making this list" (because I do) and I tried to
make it clear that I felt it had been useful at one point by saying
"any more". The fact that the list is not as useful now is not
because Selena sucks (she doesn't, by the way! - Hi Selena!) but
because Selena overhauled this list on the 19th of May and cleaned it
up some more on the 26th, and it's now the 8th of June, and not enough
systematic effort has been put into keeping it up to date. It's not
Selena's job to keep the list up to date, but it's a fact of life that
if neither she nor anyone else does, it's going to become less useful.

So I agree with your statement that we need to improve the quality of
the list, which is why I just spent three hours working on the items
where I could discern a clear action item as well as doing some
cleanup. Like most PG hackers, I am extremely busy, which is why I
would appreciate any help that you or any other community member would
care to offer to help get the list cleaned up. Failing that, or in
addition, I would appreciate feedback on what I believe to be a
legitimate complaint about the documentation items on the list,
namely, that they're mostly unimportant things that should probably
just be dropped unless or until the people who originally raised the
issues feel like pursuing them.

I am trying to solve a problem, not pick a fight. I responded to your
original post on this topic by dropping what I was planning to do this
afternoon to work on this, and I'd like a few brownie points for that.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

> Whoa, there. There is not any way of moving forward with this list
> without explaining why the list in its present form is not too useful.

Ah, the way I read your post was "the list is not useful therefore I
will ignore it." From that perspective it was important for me to
respond to you lest other hackers make the same excuse to ignore the
open items list.

So, miscommunication over!

> If I simply start overhauling the list without explaining what I
> perceive to be the systematic problems with it, then I will get yelled
> at for failing to follow community process.

Nonsense. The one good thing about admin stuff in this community is
since nobody wants to do it, you seldom get critiqued for how you did
it. ;-)

> So I agree with your statement that we need to improve the quality of
> the list, which is why I just spent three hours working on the items
> where I could discern a clear action item as well as doing some
> cleanup. Like most PG hackers, I am extremely busy, which is why I
> would appreciate any help that you or any other community member would
> care to offer to help get the list cleaned up.

Yeah, I was going through the list today trying to see if stuff needed
to be removed or added, which is why I noticed the almost total lack of
movement since the 26th.

> Failing that, or in
> addition, I would appreciate feedback on what I believe to be a
> legitimate complaint about the documentation items on the list,
> namely, that they're mostly unimportant things that should probably
> just be dropped unless or until the people who originally raised the
> issues feel like pursuing them.

Well, if something is too trivial to be worth fixing, that's a reason to
remove it.

> I am trying to solve a problem, not pick a fight. I responded to your
> original post on this topic by dropping what I was planning to do this
> afternoon to work on this, and I'd like a few brownie points for that.

Brownie points granted. Although I'd think actual brownies or cookies
would be better. ;-)

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>  If I simply start overhauling the list without explaining what I
>> perceive to be the systematic problems with it, then I will get yelled
>> at for failing to follow community process.
>
> Nonsense.  The one good thing about admin stuff in this community is
> since nobody wants to do it, you seldom get critiqued for how you did
> it.  ;-)

OK, list cleaned up. What would be really helpful now is if someone
could try to figure out new items that have come up recently that may
need to be added to the list.

> Brownie points granted.  Although I'd think actual brownies or cookies
> would be better. ;-)

You can email me off-list for my address. :-)

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 15:46 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> > Let's get 9.0 out the door, hey?
>
> What we actually need is some testing effort. The lack of bug reports
> against Hot Standby, in particular, is proof positive that no meaningful
> testing is happening.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Please don't confuse
things by claiming "proof positive" does, or even can, exist here.

A lack of bugs usually indicates there are no bugs in the areas being
tested. Which can also mean the areas being tested don't cover the full
code or that tests of anything are not being performed.

I raised the topic of how to increase the amount of testing earlier; my
proposed solution was more betas before we go live. We just guaranteed
even less testing for HS by not fixing things for Beta2.

Would you like me to patch, or are you still intending to look at
max_standby_delay yourself?

> (If you think it means HS is bug-free, I have a
> nice bridge I'd like to interest you in.)

How should we proceed?

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
...
> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
...
> A lack of bugs usually indicates there are no bugs in the areas being
> tested.

Would the real Simon Riggs please speak up? Isn't that precisely what
"absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is meant to refute?

--
greg

Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of mar jun 08 17:01:28 -0400 2010:

> I think only one of them has
> an actual patch associated with it, viz:
>
> ALTER TABLE .. DISABLE/ENABLE TRIGGER are out of date
>
> I took a look at that patch, and I expect it's probably correct, but I
> haven't actually looked at the code to verify that it's correct, so I
> didn't apply it.

I checked the behavior and the patch is correct, so I applied it.

Thanks for clearing the list. There are only 5 remaining items, which
is kinda exciting, though Tom's assertion that HS is still bug-ridden is
a bit off-putting.

--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

On Wed, 2010-06-09 at 11:34 +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> ...
> > Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
> ...
> > A lack of bugs usually indicates there are no bugs in the areas being
> > tested.
>
> Would the real Simon Riggs please speak up?

LOL, its me, flaws included.

> Isn't that precisely what
> "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is meant to refute?

You snipped out the part where I give other possible explanations also,
so the two statements above do not counterpoise each other of themselves
in my original text. I stand by my whole statement, as intended.

Now, I think I misread Tom's comments. I agree with Tom that the new bug
discovery rate has fallen to zero and that probably indicates that no
new/ground-breaking tests are taking place.

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> Thanks for clearing the list.  There are only 5 remaining items, which
> is kinda exciting, though Tom's assertion that HS is still bug-ridden is
> a bit off-putting.

It's a big piece of subtle code and it's quite possible it contains
bugs. But people know that and as a result it's received a lot of
testing and careful thought already. The chances it has bugs of its
own are probably lower than for other major projects in the past. On
the other hand it's recovery-related and it shakes me that we have no
regression tests for recovery let alone standby databases.

What's more scary are either of two cases:

1) There are use cases of varying degrees of obscurity which haven't
been explicitly covered where the behaviour is not what people would
expect. We've already fixed a few such cases such as shutdown
semantics and setting up a standby based on an backup of initdb
results before starting up the database. This is the kind of thing we
need lots of users testing their real workloads with and doing test
failovers and so on.

2) There are unrelated areas of the database which have collateral
damage that nobody expected and thought to test for. Hopefully we have
enough regression tests to detect this kind of thing but again as
there are no regression tests for recovery we could have bugs in other
systems that don't turn up until you use those systems on a standby
database or after running the system as a standby database and then
bringing it up.

--
greg