On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 5:51 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> So in an attempt to actually move this forward in a constructive way I'm
> going to ignore a bunch of what happened after this email, and fork the
> discussion at this point.
Thanks, and I probably owe you an apology for some of that, so, sorry
about that.
I think the core of the problem here is that the old application saw
its goal in life as *summarizing* the thread. The idea is that people
would go in and add comments (which could be flagged as comment,
patch, or review) pointing to particularly important messages in the
discussion. The problem with this is that it had to be manually
updated, and some people didn't like that.[1] The new app attaches
the entire thread, which has the advantage that everything is always
there. The problem with that is that the unimportant stuff is there,
too, and there's no way to mark the important stuff so that you can
distinguish between that and the unimportant stuff. I think that's
the problem we need to solve.
One thing that would probably *help* is if the list of attachments
mentioned the names of the files that were attached to each message
rather than just noting that they have some kind of attachment. If
people name their attachments sensibly, then you'll be able to
distinguish parallel-seqscan-v23.patch from
test-case-that-breaks-parallel-seqscan.sql, and that would be nice.
But that doesn't help with, say, distinguishing useful reviews from
general discussion on the thread. I don't think there's any way to do
that in an automated way, so it's got to be something that somebody
does manually.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
[1] My personal opinion is that this complaint was misguided. I have
yet to see an issue tracker that didn't require scads of manual work
to keep the information in it relevant, and ours had a higher
signal-to-noise ratio than many I've had to use professionally. That
having been said, I understand the frustration.
