Re: Learning curves and such (was Re: pgFoundry)

On T, 2005-05-17 at 01:32 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

>
> As against that I notice some new arrivals proposing to add deductive
> reasoning to Postgres:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-05/msg01045.php
> or implement SQL99 hierarchical queries:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-05/msg01089.php

I guess you have missed most of the latest discussion around
hierarchical queries ;)

>From what I understand, what is proposed is a "code beautification
project", (although likely not minor :) , because the pathes have been
around (and allegedly in production use) for a few years already,
originally supporting Oracle-style HQs and then, for about a year also
subset of SQL99 (it misses SEARCH and CYCLE clauses, see the railroad
diagram at http://gppl.moonbone.ru/with_clause.gif )

The patch is available at http://gppl.moonbone.ru/index.shtml

> I might be wrong, but I'll bet lunch that neither of those projects will
> come to anything. You can't run before you learn to crawl.

Maybe you could take a look at the existing patch and comment what are
the points that are most "wrong" with it. The last one was for 8.0.1.

I'm sure someone more at home with pg internals would get the patch to
acceptable level faster, but my feeling is that somehow these patches
have been just not interesting to core developers.

> Maybe what we need is some documentation about how to get started
> as a Postgres hacker --- what to read, what sort of things to tackle
> for your first hack, etc. I think the people who have been successful
> around here are the ones who have managed to figure out the syllabus
> by themselves ... but surely we could try to teach those who come
> after.

A code documentation or beautification project is usually a good way to
get newcomers up to speed.

And though the getting the the HQ patch into acceptable shape is
probably quite big work, just starting with understanding and
documenting what it does now and getting further help from pgsql-hackers
on what it should do may be something that is possible without existing
thorough understanding.

--
Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)skype(dot)net>