Re: pgFoundry - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

What projects have big roadmaps?  The only one I can think of is
Mozilla, and we all know how well that worked (aka Firefox).  In fact,
you could argue that the Mozilla focus on the roadmap blinded them to
focusing on user needs, and made the obsolete.

I have modifed the TODO HTML so the completed items are in italics.

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> > I don't think anybody is arguing for a radical change in culture - 
> > certainly I would not be so presumptuous after only a couple of years 
> > :-)  But a roadmap could be useful in many ways. It need not tie anybody 
> > down, if positioned right, but can help people to see where things are 
> > going, and where the gaps are. This could in a sense be as simple as 
> > prioritising the TODO list.
> 
> I think that even getting that done would turn into a flamew^H^H^H^Hhuge
> distraction.  The way things really work around here is that individual
> developers have their own priorities and they work on what seems most
> important to them at the time.  (In some cases those priorities may be
> set by their companies more than by the individuals, but that's
> irrelevant from the community's perspective.)  ISTM any sort of
> project-wide prioritization would be either (1) meaningless or (2) a
> guaranteed-to-fail attempt to assert control over other contributors.
> 
> But the TODO list could certainly be made more informative without
> getting into that swamp.  I don't think it does very well at conveying
> the relative sizes of the work items, nor the extent to which there is
> consensus about how particular problems ought to be solved (the fact
> that something is on TODO does not necessarily mean that all the major
> contributors have bought into it...).  And of course you're right that
> it tells nothing at all about whether progress is currently being made
> on a given item.  The markers indicating that someone has expressed
> interest in an item don't mean they are actively doing anything with it.
> 
> The real difficulty here is exactly what Lamar noted: who's going to do
> the work?  Bruce seems to be swamped already, so we'd need a new
> volunteer to maintain a more useful TODO list, and there doesn't seem
> to be anyone who wants to do it and has the depth of familiarity with
> the project to do a good job of it.
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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