On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Bruce Momjian<bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Third, Robert, you should have communicated to the list that you were
> going to work on the patch, so that there would not be duplicate effort
> if someone else was also working on it. As I understood it, Heikki was
> in control of the patch, but it doesn't hurt to send out a short email
> stating you wanted to work on it now. In this case no one was working
> on it, but if someone had been, there would have been duplicate effort
> and that is disappointing to everyone. Odds are when you started on the
> patch you didn't realize you would be overhauling it, but once that
> became clear, an email to hackers, ideally CC'ing the original patch
> authors, would have been a good idea.
Simon asked me about this offlist as well: I'll repeat the gist of
what I said to him here. I really wasn't sure how far I was going to
be able to get with this, and I didn't put more work into it before
sending it than the amount of time I was willing to waste on it. I
figured that I was fairly safe because there had been no activity for
5 months, but if I had been wrong, I was prepared to accept that. I
thought it would be a little arrogant to say I was going to work on
the patch without having any idea whether I was going to be able to do
anything useful with it; since I ended up getting something that may
be useful done, it now seems like I should've said something, but that
was a little less obvious at the time. At any rate, I am sensitive to
the issue and will try to handle it better the next time.
Also, to my knowledge, nobody has really looked through the results to
see if they are any good, so the success of the endeavor remains in
doubt from my point of view. That's a bit of a shame because I am
interested in putting some more time into this, but I don't have the
knowledge or experience to "fly solo" here.
...Robert