Re: Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2

On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Gevik babakhani wrote:

> Well excuse me for trying to organize a home for whatever experimentations I
> was doing for the KB. Maybe it was better to not have been enthusiastic and
> certainly not to have shown *ideas* and *concepts* which have raised all
> kinds questions and irritations on people.

Gevik ... actually, from reading through this whole thread, you were one
of the ones that was actually doing it all properly, keeping -www in the
loop ... definitely please keep it up ...

  >
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-www-
>> owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Josh Berkus
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 6:17 PM
>> To: pgsql-www@postgresql.org
>> Cc: Magnus Hagander; Marc G. Fournier
>> Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2
>>
>> Magnus,
>>
>>> But this is *just a techdocs replacement*, not a whizz-bang KB. It
>>> fulfills the techdocs requirements for easy editing and searching, and
>>> the communitys erquirements for easy maintenance. It does not fullfill
>>> all the other KB requiremetns (I'm sure, though I haven't seen teh whole
>>> list since it's not finished - but there are definitly several that
>>> aren't). It places the bar a lot lower, making it easier to get done...
>>
>> Hmmm ... well, any good KB should subsume techdocs as one aspect of its
>> functionality.   I don't like to see duplicated effort if we can help it.
>> Heck, for the much-maligned corporate KB effort step #2 will be evaluating
>> existing KB projects to see if any of them meets requirements or can be
>> made
>> to with a minimum of effort.    And even if we do something custom it will
>> probably be based on GreenPlum's custom KB I'm currently building (in PHP
>> &
>> PL/pgSQL).
>>
>> On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you if you thought that the latest KB
>> effort was liable to founder and die and that you needed to have a back-
>> up.
>> It wouldn't be the first one.  But in that case I'd suggest looking at
>> adapting something existing (like Bricolage, Framewerk, Drupal, etc.)
>> rather
>> than coding up from scratch.  If you keep your requirements simple, at
>> least
>> one of these should suffice, and has the tremendous advantage of having
>> external code maintainence, documentation, and help.
>>
>>> We're not against it. I think the irkness (sp? :-):-) ) comes from the
>> fact
>>> that the ongoing project (Gevik had been regularly demo'ing his
>>> progress) was essentially ripped out from here without our knowledge and
>>> reformed on a pgFoundry site,
>>
>> Ah, Kennisgres was put up months ago (like, August).  I'd no idea that
>> Gevik
>> hadn't discussed it here.   I can see that that would be a rude shock.
>>
>>> and was about to be re-specced possibly in
>>> complete contradition to what we had originally thrashed out - without
>>> so much as a 'by your leave'.
>>
>> Well, unfortunately no spec document ever came out of dicussion on this
>> list.
>> In fact, I was on this list for that discussion, and my recall of it is
>> that
>> there was a lot of shooting the breeze but no real decisions were actually
>> made.  At least, nothing that had a consensus behind it.
>>
>> One of the big issues -- in fact, THE big issue -- with increasing
>> participation in WWW administration is the total and complete lack of
>> documentation for any WWW decisions, infrastructure, or code.  While I can
>> understand lagging in documenting stuff (like, I have a draft of the
>> release
>> PR procedure I have yet to discuss online despite being on my HDD for a
>> month), it's extremely irrational for people on this list to pitch a fit
>> at
>> potential contributors for not psychically understanding what WWW wants or
>> not reading the WWW list back to the beginning of time.
>>
>> That is, it's one thing to say: "Hey, you should probably read this
>> thread, we
>> already discussed it here ____________", and another thing entirely to say
>> "You asshole!  We already decided that, why didn't you pay attention!"
>> Currently, this list has an awful lot of the former.
>>
>> This isn't just the KB.  It affects the whole web infrastructure.  For
>> example, we've been running on the new web site code for almost 2 years,
>> and
>> how many translations of the site have there been?   Exactly none.  Why?
>> Zero documentation on how to translate the site.
>>
>> If our project can insist that all database code patches come with full
>> documentation, I think maybe it's time that we start insisting that all
>> WWW
>> patches come with documentation.
>>
>> --
>> Josh Berkus
>> Aglio Database Solutions
>> San Francisco
>>
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>
>

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664