Re: small but useful patches for text search - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
>> On Tuesday 17 March 2009 09:38:59 Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > You are assuming that only commit-fest work is required to get us to
>> > beta.  You might remember the long list of open items I faced in January
>> > that I have whittled down, but I still have about twenty left.
>> >
>>
>> I think part of the perception of the project sitting around doing nothing
>> isn't so much that you/tom are doing nothing, but others who were doing
>> review or coding features are now caught in limbo. One of the things the
>> commitfest has been successful at is helping delegate code review. Perhaps we
>> need to take a fresh look at your list of twenty things and see what can be
>> delegated out to others.
>
> Yep, I agree.  The problem is that last time I put out a list that
> wasn't clensed I got a lot of compaints so I am only going to put out a
> list that is 100% accurate, and that will take hours to produce, time I
> don't have now because I am working on the release notes.

I don't want to be a grump, but this is a false dichotomy.  What you
put out last time was a dump of 700 emails, much of which was
irrelevant and most of the rest of which was duplicative of itself or
the CommitFest wiki.  Now, it may be true that even if your list was
80% accurate, people would still have complained about the other 20%,
but we don't know that, because the actual list was at best 10%
accurate, and of course people are going to complain about that.

I personally think that the way pgsql-hackers organizes itself using
email is completely insane.  The only reason that you need to write
the release notes instead of, say, me, is because the only information
on what needs to go into them is buried in a thicket of CVS commit
messages that I am not nearly brave enough to attempt to penetrate.  I
suggested putting them in CVS yesterday; Tom didn't like that, but
what about a wiki page or a database?  grep 'release notes'
/last/six/months/of/email can't possibly be the best way to do this.
Given any sort of list to work from, even one that is totally
disorganized and written in broken English, I can't believe this is
more than an hour or two of work, and I'd be more than happy to take a
crack at it (I'm probably not the only one, either).

Similarly, the only reason we don't have a workable TODO list is
because you're attempting to extract it from a disorganized jumble of
email after the fact, instead of maintaining it publicly and adding
and removing items along the way.  It might be slightly more work to
think up a reasonable label for an action item at the time you learn
about it than to just dump the email in a folder, but I think the time
you didn't have to spend sorting through it later would more than make
up for it.  Plus then items could be worked on along the way instead
of waiting until the bitter end when the TODO list materializes and we
all say "Oh, really?".

...Robert