Re: pgsql-patches considered harmful

On Mon, 9 Jul 2006, Greg Stark wrote:

>
> Pursuant to a conversation this evening I would like to a suggestion:
>
> BIRT pgsql-patches should be abolished in favour of something else that
> accomplishes the bandwidth-reduction aspect without the downsides.
>
> My complaint is that -patches serves to
>
> a) siphon off some of the most technical discussion from -hackers to somewhere
> where fewer hackers read regularly leaving a lower signal-to-noise ratio on
> -hackers.
>
> b) partition the discussions in strange ways making it harder to carry on
> coherent threads or check past discussions for conclusions.
>
> c) encourages patches to sit in queues until a committer can review it rather
> than have non-committers eyeballing it or even applying it locally and
> using it before it's ready to be committed to HEAD.
>
> The only defence I've heard for the existence of -patches is that it avoids
> large attachments filling people's inboxes.
>
> To that end I would suggest replacing it with a script on the mail server to
> strip out attachments and replace them with a link to some place where they
> can be downloaded.
>
> This could conceivably evolve into some sort of simple patch queue system
> where committers could view a list of patches and mark them when they get
> rejected or committed. I'm not suggesting anything like a bug tracking system,
> just a simple page should suffice.
>
> I fear by sending this I may have just volunteered to execute it. But if it's
> the case that people support my suggestion I would be happy to do so.

I, for one, would be interested in something like that ... somehow, this
'stripping' would have to be done within Majordomo2 itself, or ...

Leave pgsql-patches@ as an alias that is "the stripper", with the end
result forwarded over to the pgsql-hackers@ list?

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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