Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
> If people are interested in the status of a patch, I think it's fine for
> them to email the person who's volunteered to work on it. If there
> hasn't been public activity from that person in recent times, it is
> probably a reasonable bet that the work has stalled. Formalizing the
> process strikes me as a waste of time, and IMHO would mostly serve to
> irritate the folks working on these features.
I tend to agree --- I don't see much value in trying to institute a
formalized process. We have not had that many cases where lack of
communication was a problem.
In the case at hand (hierarchical queries), I believe what happened was
that Jonah expected that he'd be able to complete the feature with a
relatively small amount of work by starting with the existing patch.
When he got into it he realized that a complete rewrite was needed, and
there was no time to get that done for 8.2. He told a few of us at the
anniversary conference, and perhaps should have been more proactive
about mentioning the problem on the mailing list, but *it would have
made no difference* as to whether hierarchical queries got into 8.2.
There was not anyone else in a position to invest the work needed in
the time available, either.
regards, tom lane