Re: Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2 - Mailing list pgsql-www

Magnus,

> But this is *just a techdocs replacement*, not a whizz-bang KB. It
> fulfills the techdocs requirements for easy editing and searching, and
> the communitys erquirements for easy maintenance. It does not fullfill
> all the other KB requiremetns (I'm sure, though I haven't seen teh whole
> list since it's not finished - but there are definitly several that
> aren't). It places the bar a lot lower, making it easier to get done...

Hmmm ... well, any good KB should subsume techdocs as one aspect of its
functionality.   I don't like to see duplicated effort if we can help it.
Heck, for the much-maligned corporate KB effort step #2 will be evaluating
existing KB projects to see if any of them meets requirements or can be made
to with a minimum of effort.    And even if we do something custom it will
probably be based on GreenPlum's custom KB I'm currently building (in PHP &
PL/pgSQL).

On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you if you thought that the latest KB
effort was liable to founder and die and that you needed to have a back-up.
It wouldn't be the first one.  But in that case I'd suggest looking at
adapting something existing (like Bricolage, Framewerk, Drupal, etc.) rather
than coding up from scratch.  If you keep your requirements simple, at least
one of these should suffice, and has the tremendous advantage of having
external code maintainence, documentation, and help.

> We're not against it. I think the irkness (sp? :-):-) ) comes from the fact
> that the ongoing project (Gevik had been regularly demo'ing his
> progress) was essentially ripped out from here without our knowledge and
> reformed on a pgFoundry site,

Ah, Kennisgres was put up months ago (like, August).  I'd no idea that Gevik
hadn't discussed it here.   I can see that that would be a rude shock.

> and was about to be re-specced possibly in
> complete contradition to what we had originally thrashed out - without
> so much as a 'by your leave'.

Well, unfortunately no spec document ever came out of dicussion on this list.
In fact, I was on this list for that discussion, and my recall of it is that
there was a lot of shooting the breeze but no real decisions were actually
made.  At least, nothing that had a consensus behind it.

One of the big issues -- in fact, THE big issue -- with increasing
participation in WWW administration is the total and complete lack of
documentation for any WWW decisions, infrastructure, or code.  While I can
understand lagging in documenting stuff (like, I have a draft of the release
PR procedure I have yet to discuss online despite being on my HDD for a
month), it's extremely irrational for people on this list to pitch a fit at
potential contributors for not psychically understanding what WWW wants or
not reading the WWW list back to the beginning of time.

That is, it's one thing to say: "Hey, you should probably read this thread, we
already discussed it here ____________", and another thing entirely to say
"You asshole!  We already decided that, why didn't you pay attention!"
Currently, this list has an awful lot of the former.

This isn't just the KB.  It affects the whole web infrastructure.  For
example, we've been running on the new web site code for almost 2 years, and
how many translations of the site have there been?   Exactly none.  Why?
Zero documentation on how to translate the site.

If our project can insist that all database code patches come with full
documentation, I think maybe it's time that we start insisting that all WWW
patches come with documentation.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco