Robert Haas wrote:
> I personally think that the way pgsql-hackers organizes itself using
> email is completely insane. The only reason that you need to write
> the release notes instead of, say, me, is because the only information
> on what needs to go into them is buried in a thicket of CVS commit
> messages that I am not nearly brave enough to attempt to penetrate. I
> suggested putting them in CVS yesterday; Tom didn't like that, but
> what about a wiki page or a database? grep 'release notes'
> /last/six/months/of/email can't possibly be the best way to do this.
> Given any sort of list to work from, even one that is totally
> disorganized and written in broken English, I can't believe this is
> more than an hour or two of work, and I'd be more than happy to take a
> crack at it (I'm probably not the only one, either).
Let me just add, as a way of macro-understanding our approach to
development, that the Postgres community has always been set up to get
the maximum feedback from the community, even if it sometimes increases
the work required by a few core folks to keep things going.
So some of the things we do that seem inefficient are done because many
feel a more structured approach would limit our ability to harness the
strengths of our community. For example, moving to a bug tracking
system would make some things much easier, but would probably dampen our
momentum. Handling discussions via web forums instead of email would
probably have the same effect. Of course, I might be wrong, but that is
what many in the community think.
I think the example of moving the TODO list to a wiki, that was supposed
to relive a lot of the burden I carry to maintain the TODO list, has
really not affected my workload much, which kind of reinforces the
feeling that our existing setup is probably the best we are going to do.
Of course, the commit fest wikis have helped, so I guess there is room
for improvement in some places.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +