Re: pgFoundry

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> I don't think anybody is arguing for a radical change in culture -
> certainly I would not be so presumptuous after only a couple of years
> :-) But a roadmap could be useful in many ways. It need not tie anybody
> down, if positioned right, but can help people to see where things are
> going, and where the gaps are. This could in a sense be as simple as
> prioritising the TODO list.

I think that even getting that done would turn into a flamew^H^H^H^Hhuge
distraction. The way things really work around here is that individual
developers have their own priorities and they work on what seems most
important to them at the time. (In some cases those priorities may be
set by their companies more than by the individuals, but that's
irrelevant from the community's perspective.) ISTM any sort of
project-wide prioritization would be either (1) meaningless or (2) a
guaranteed-to-fail attempt to assert control over other contributors.

But the TODO list could certainly be made more informative without
getting into that swamp. I don't think it does very well at conveying
the relative sizes of the work items, nor the extent to which there is
consensus about how particular problems ought to be solved (the fact
that something is on TODO does not necessarily mean that all the major
contributors have bought into it...). And of course you're right that
it tells nothing at all about whether progress is currently being made
on a given item. The markers indicating that someone has expressed
interest in an item don't mean they are actively doing anything with it.

The real difficulty here is exactly what Lamar noted: who's going to do
the work? Bruce seems to be swamped already, so we'd need a new
volunteer to maintain a more useful TODO list, and there doesn't seem
to be anyone who wants to do it and has the depth of familiarity with
the project to do a good job of it.

regards, tom lane