Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Added the Skytools extended transaction ID module to contrib as

On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 11:32:19PM +0000, Jan Wieck wrote:
> Log Message:
> -----------
> Added the Skytools extended transaction ID module to contrib as discussed
> on CORE previously.
>
> This module offers transaction ID's containing the original XID and the
> transaction epoch as a bigint value to the user level. It also provides
> a special txid_snapshot data type that contains an entire transactions
> visibility snapshot information, which is useful to determine if a
> particular txid was visible to a transaction or not.
>
> The module has been tested by porting Slony-I from using its original
> xxid data type.
>
> Jan

A couple of questions on this. I'm not objecting to the tech stuff itself,
but on procedure:

1) Why was this added without any discussion, or even notification, on
-hackers before it was done? Last I checked, -core claim not to deal with
such technicalities, but defer to -hackers (or other lists as needed). I certainly
trust -core to make the right call no these things, but it's not the
procedure that we claim to have.

If that procedure is changing (I've been getting a sneaky feeling that
it's tilting a bit in that direction before this one), that's fine, but it
should be communicated to the community so everybody knows how it works.

2) How can this go in *months* after feature freeze, and even after we
tagged and bundled beta1? This makes such discission even more important,
IMHO.

3) I thought the general agreement was to cut down on contrib, and move
things either to pgfoundry or to core. Why are we adding more? I'm sure
there's motivation for this as discussed on -core, but the rest of us would
like to know that as well... Like why we're not trying to make it a real
feature, if it's something that's important enough to break the rules as in
#2 above.

Or I could've missed the discussion on -hackers that actually took place -
in that case, just discard this message. but the only one I recall is
someone asking for pl/proxy to go in.

//Magnus