Re: Discontent with development process (was:Re: pgaccess

Tom Lane wrote:
> Lamar Owen <lamar(dot)owen(at)wgcr(dot)org> writes:
> > Although this config file stuff is small potatoes compared to the
> > Win32 stuff as recently discussed. And for that, please understand
> > that most of the developers here consider Win32 an inferior server
> > platform. In fact, Win32 _is_ an inferior server platform, at least
> > in my opinion. But, if you want to do the work, and it doesn't break
> > my non-Win32 server build, by all means go for it.
>
> Note that "doesn't break non-Win32 builds" is not really the standard
> that will get applied. Ongoing readability and maintainability of the
> codebase is a very high priority in my eyes, and I think in the eyes
> of most of the key developers. To the extent that Win32 support can
> be added without hurting those goals, I have nothing against it.

The tricky twist will be to keep good readability while
taking different solution approaches for different Systems
(e.g. fork() only for *NIX vs. CreateProcess() for Win). I
agree that your high priority goal is a good one. Thinking
about good old Unix semantics, having a higher priority means
not beeing as nice as others, right? Then again, even with
the lowest possible nice level a process doesn't own the CPU
exclusively (so it never becomes rude).

> I'll even put up with localized ugliness (see the BeOS support hacks
> for an example of what I'd call localized ugliness). But I get unhappy
> when there's airy handwaving about moving all static variables into some
> global data structure, to take just one of the points that were under
> discussion last week. That'd be a big maintainability penalty IMHO.

As I understood it the idea was to put the stuff, the
backends inherit from the postmaster, into a centralized
place, instead of having it spread out all over the place.
What's wrong with that?

> As for the more general point --- my recollection of that thread was
> that mlw himself was more than a bit guilty of adopting a "my way or no
> way" attitude; if he sees some pushback from the other developers maybe
> he should consider the possibility that he's creating his own problem.
> In general this development community is one of the most civilized I've
> ever seen. I don't think it's that hard to get consensus on most
> topics. The consensus isn't always the same as my personal opinion...
> but that's the price of being part of a community.

Yeah, maybe democracy wasn't such a perfect idea at all ...

Jan ;-)

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