"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.
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.
regards, tom lane