Re: On status data and summaries

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 04:27:41PM -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In a possible moment of insanity, in
>
> <http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-09/msg00579.php>
>
> I volunteered to try to help solve a problem Tom Lane noted: "The
> hard part of this problem is finding a convenient way to capture
> status data out of the community's conversations." I observed
> that companies who do this well actually employ people to do that
> sort of thing, and that this might be a way for code morons like
> yours truly to make a contribution to development.
>
> I've been struggling since then, trying to figure out where to start.
> There are a _lot_ of discussions on -hackers, and many of them are
> blind alleys. Moreover, I can't summarise everything, I don't think,
> and still make any of those summaries sufficiently detailed to allow
> them to be useful. So I have a proposal.
>
> I was thinking of tracking 3 or 4 such discussions in the next
> release cycle, as a kind of proof of concept. I'm willing to do
> that, but I'd need guidance from those who are trying to produce a
> complicated feature, telling me that they need the support.
> Therefore, if someone involved in some such discussion pokes me
> saying, "Follow this thread, please", I'll follow the thread in
> question (as well as follow-up discussions that come of it), and
> produce regular (weekly?) summaries of what I take to be the state of
> the collective mind, until such time as the code supporting the
> feature is checked in and agreed to. Then, at release time, the
> developers can evaluate whether the tracking produced few surprises
> at the end (and, perhaps, less thrash), or whether the experiment did
> not provide any benefit. If it does, we can see whether we can make
> this sort of thing scale by adding some additional volunteers to do a
> similar job in future.
>
> Does that seem worth doing?

ISTM that it would be important to do that on threads/ideas that end up
getting 'lost', which means you'll never get a cry for help. Though
looking out for controversial threads might work...
--
Jim Nasby jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)