> "Mark Woodward" <pgsql@mohawksoft.com> writes:
>> My frustration level often kills any desire to contribute to open
>> source.
>> Sometimes, I think that open source is doomed. The various projects I
>> track and use are very frustrating, they remind me of dysfunctional
>> engineering departments in huge companies, it is very hard to positively
>> discuss any new ideas. The first response is always some variation on
>> "no."
>
> Well, at least for PG the process has to be biased towards "no", because
> we have to keep the code reliable and maintainable. If we bias in the
> direction of throwing in every little feature someone thinks up, we'll
> soon have a buggy, incomprehensible mess.
I would submit that there is an intermediate state, and perhaps the medium
is too binary, where someone says "Lets send a man to Jupiter, here's why"
Before dismissing it out of hand, one tries to understand the reasons why,
and sugest how to get there or alternate destinations. Not just say, I
don't want to go to jupiter.
>
> FWIW, the proposal as it seems to have evolved (config file separate
> from pg_service and known only to pg_ctl) doesn't seem too unreasonable
> to me. I might have some use for it personally, if the implementation
> is capable of launching back-version postmasters as well as
> current-version.
This is what I'm talking about, this was constructive, and while I
wouldn't have thought of it, I think having something like
"POSTMASTER=/usr/local/pg7.4/bin/postmaster," while not something I would
personally use, may apply to other users.