Re: [pgsql-www] commitfest.postgresql.org

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> The current URL seems to be
>>> http://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view?id=2
>>> which is both opaque as can be and not looking like it's intended to
>>> be stable over the long term.
>
>> I'm not sure why you would think that it's not stable.
>
> Because it's exposing three or four details of your implementation,
> which you might wish to change later.
>
>> I'm also not sure what you would think that it's not self-explanatory,
>> since it looks pretty self explanatory to me.
>
> It's impossible to know that this is commitfest 2009-07.

Backing up for a moment to ten thousand feet here, I posted a link to
this web app on May 26th.  I received several comments on it, all of
them positive, including some constructive feedback from you which I
took to heart.  It is now July 1st, and I am trying very hard to get
ready for the next CommitFest, which I have agreed to manage.  So I
need to determine whether there is some finite number of changes of
manageable size that I can make to get this to a state where we can
use it, or whether I should give up hope now and go back to the wiki.
The latter outcome would be disappointing to me, but that's where
we're going to end up if we can't actually boil this down to a
specific list of changes to be made.

I accept the need for and am willing to make the following changes:

- Changing the patch comment field from type text to type textarea and
integrating it into the patch view page to provide context.
- Adding a note to the effect that the message ID is optional.
- Adding stable links with mnemonic names for the open, in progress,
and most recently closed commitfests.

With respect to the issue of the page URLs, I'm very unconvinced of
the value of making a change.  First of all, one of your arguments is
that I might want to change them later.  I can promise you that I
won't want to do any such thing, or at the VERY least that the old
URLs will always be supported.  There would be a sort of perverse
irony to me changing the application to use a different kind of key
for the reason that Tom Lane is afraid that some day I might want to
use a different kind of key.

Secondly, if we are going to make a change, it would be nice to know
what the use case is for the change and to have a set of requirements
that are not mutually contradictory.  It is not possible to both
assign the URLs to the pages based on the names of the objects to
which the refer (which are changeable) and to guarantee that the URLs
will never change.  So you can either have URL stability or you can
have wiki-style names, but you can't have both, unless perhaps you
include both the ID and the name in the link but make the name just
decoration.  I am frankly at a loss to why this is a big deal: if you
bookmark the page, your browser will record the page title; if you use
firefox, you can also find by page title in the address bar.  And
we've never had pages for individual patches before anyway, so why
should it now be critical how those links are formatted?  But if it is
critical then please describe exactly how you think it should work.

...Robert