On Fri, 2011-07-08 at 21:04 -0700, Darren Duncan wrote:
> > I think you should make more of an effort to understand how the system
> > works now, and why, before proposing radical redesigns.
>
> Well yes, of course. But that will take time and I think I already understand
> enough about it to make some useful contributions in the meantime. How much or
> what I already know may not always come across well. If this bothers people
> then I can make more of an effort to reduce my input until I have more solid
> things to back them up.
I don't think anyone expects you to understand all the internal APIs in
postgres before you make a proposal. But we do expect you to look
critically at your own proposals with the status quo (i.e. existing
code, users, and standards) in mind. And that probably means poking at
the code a little to see if you find stumbling blocks, and asking
questions to try to trace out the shape of the project.
I'm hoping that we can learn a lot from your work on Muldis D. In
particular, the type system might be the most fertile ground -- you've
clearly done some interesting things there, and I think we've felt some
pressure to improve the type system from a number of different
projects*.
Regards,
Jeff Davis
* That being said, PostgreSQL's type system is actually very good.
Consider the sophisticated type infrastructure (or at least plumbing
around the type system) required to make KNN-GiST work, for instance.