Re: knngist patch support

On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, Tom Lane wrote:

> Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su> writes:
>> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
>> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
>> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
>> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch.
>
> There was a scheduling problem all right, which was that this patch *did
> not make* the deadline for the November CF.  The fact that it got any
> review at all in November was more than expected under the CF process.
> And I remind you that we stated more than once that we didn't want major
> feature patches to show up only at the last CF.  If it had come from
> anyone other than you and Teodor, there would have not been even a
> moment's consideration of letting it into 9.0.

there were several long threads, which I have no possibility to follow,
so we relied on the wisdom of people, who can discuss. So, it's true we
didn't track all nuances of our development schedule. We just developed.
Looked on commitfest page we didn't find any summary and it's hard to
understand  what is the final word.

In the old-good time we also discussed
a lot, we release faster and we always had tolerance of time, since many 
things were not formalized, we were developers and reviewed each other. 
Now, the whole process of development redesigned to be more enterprize, 
but we still have problem with resources - developers, reviewers. And I don't
see, how all changes try to solve this problem. We have problem with long
release cycle, it's getting worse and worse, in spite of CF. The main problem 
is not in scheduling - we have little delta here, the problem is in human 
resources and unclear regulations make it worse.


>
> My own feeling about it is that I much preferred the original proposal
> of a contrib module with little or no change to core code.  I don't want
> to be changing core code for this at this late hour.  If it were only
> touching GIST I'd be willing to rely on your and Teodor's expertise in
> that module, but it's not.  It whacks around the planner, it makes
> questionable changes in the operator class structure, and the last

aha, we originally submit contrib module, which didn't touch anything you 
mentioned, we improve stuff to follow discussion and now we are out of luck %(

> version I saw hadn't any documentation whatever.  It's not committable
> on documentation grounds alone, even if everybody was satisfied about
> the code.

well, there is enough documentation to review patch. 
In my understanding this was always enough to submit code. 
User's documentation is depend on discussion and review and can be added later
before releasing beta.

>
> How do you feel about going back to the original contrib module for now
> and resubmitting the builtin version for 9.1?

Hmm, one good thing is that rbtree seems ok for submisson. We need to discuss
this, if it's good for PostGIS community. I'd not complain about this decision
if it touch my interests only, I could live with closed-source patch.
    Regards,        Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83