Tom Lane wrote:
> I tend to agree --- I don't see much value in trying to institute a
> formalized process.
One more problem with the formalized process of claiming features
in advance may stop what I suspect is a significant source of
contributions -- people who add features/patches for internal
work in their company and only after the fact find that they
are something they'd contribute back.
The small contribution I made (to help admins know when FSM
settings were too low by monitoring log files instead
of manual checks[1]) was done because we wanted it internally.
Only after it proved useful to us, it was mentioned to the lists.
Thanks in part to the BSD nature of postgresql, I suspect
there are many internal-and-not-yet-released useful patches
lurking around in industry. If I'm right, I'd wonder what
the advocacy guys could do to get corporations to volunteer
to contribute changes back that they've found useful
internally.
> We have not had that many cases where lack of
> communication was a problem.
One could say too much communication was the problem this time.
I get the impression people implied they'd do something on a TODO
and didn't. Arguably the project had been better off if noone
had claimed the TODO, so if another company/team/whatever needed
the feature badly, they could have worked on it themselves rather
than waiting in hope of the feature. Of course they could have
done this anyway - but if they see it on an implied roadmap document
for the next release they're more likely to wait.
Ron
[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2005-02/msg00171.php
