Now, I don't actually suggest we *remove* it, as there is valuable curated
content, but that we rename it to something which won't encourage newcomers to
pick something from the list simply because it exists. The name "TODO" implies
that the list is something which it isn't.
+1
The name is very much at odds with the content. To pick one baffling example, there's an entry under Free Space Map that dates to before the on-disk FSM was invented. A more accurate, if not charitable, description is "archive of stalled discussions". This is just a side effect of non-controversial todos getting finished over time. That could be helped with a round of aggressive culling.
Also, it's organized by functionality, which makes sense in a way, but I don't find very useful in this context. Better categories might be
help-wanted,
good-first-issue (I know this is a tough one),
feature-request,
won't-fix (The memory leaks under discussion go here, it seems),
code-cleanup,
research-project,
documentation,
performance,
user-experience,
sql-standard
etc.
I suspect we will eventually want something like a full-blown issue tracker, although I gather that's been rejected previously. But a wiki page is not really suited for this.
I've found that a better source of actual "todo"s from developers can be found in some commit messages, by grepping for "left for future work" or "for another day". I've gotten patch ideas (and more than one committed) from these. If I were asked, that's where I'd point aspiring developers.