Re: [HACKERS] blog post on ancient history - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> >> Anyone feels in mood for a comment?
>
> > I see our mailing list archives for pgsql-hackers only go back to
> > 1997, so it's hard to track down what was going on in 1996.  But as
> > for why no one remembers the guy, it's probably because we've had
> > nearly 100% churn in the set of people who are involved.  Tom Lane
> > isn't mentioned in the commit log until 1998.  We could see if Bruce
> > or Marc remember him, but just to put this in perspective, the guy
> > made 6 commits out of almost 900 that year.
>
> According to the logs there was a seventh patch committed for him by
> Marc, but still: seven patches, touching only libpq and psql (not by any
> means as "internal" as this blogger thinks), committed over a period of
> about a month.  That's not exactly a large or sustained contribution.
> Is it surprising that everyone had forgotten it a few years later?
>
> > I don't think we had the
> > same standards for granting commit access back then that we do now.
>
> Yeah, the only thing that's even mildly surprising is that he seems to
> have been given commit privileges after only one patch.  However,
> there's an indication in one of the commit messages that he'd previously
> contributed to the code while Berkeley had it:
>
> 1996-07-25 02:46  julian
>
>       * src/bin/psql/psql.c: Large re-write/enhancement. In pg-101 Jolly
>       only included a smaller part of my (proff) patch. This is the rest
>       of it, with a few, mainly aesthetic changes. I've removed a lot of
>       redundency from the original code, added support for the new
>       PQprint() routines in libpq, expanded tables, and a few generally
>       nifty ways of massaging data in and out of the backend. Still needs
>       some good stress testing.
>
> so maybe that history had something to do with it.

The spring/summer of 1996 was a time when we were trying to gather all
the scattered work of people who had created patches to Postgres95 but
had not been integrated by Jolly.  Seems Julian had been in that group
so his patches were quickly applied.  If he had asked for commit, I
would have given it to him because he had a history of contributing to
the project (which I could not confirm).

FYI, I do think I have an archive of much of the pg95-dev@ki.net on a
DAT tape in my basement, and I have an unpowered computer down there
with a DAT tape drive ... hmmm.

--
 Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
 EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +

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