Re: TODO list (was Re: Contributing with code)

Greetings,

* Patrick Krecker (pkrecker(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> As a person looking to become a postgres contributor, perhaps I can
> offer some perspective on this. I think there is value in providing
> *some* starting point for new contributors in the form of concrete
> problems to solve. The value I hope to extract from the time spent on
> my first feature comes mostly from the learning experience and not
> from the acceptance of the feature itself. I would not be upset if my
> work was never accepted as long as I understand why. I expect most
> people picking features at random from a TODO list would have a
> similar outlook on their first contribution.

I really appreciate this view-point on it and think that it's definitely
a good one to have, though I don't expect everyone to share it.

While I tend to agree that the TODO list is valuable, what I don't think
it has that is really key is any notion around 'level of difficulty' or
'who you can talk to about trying to address this item'.

We had a rather successful Google Summer of Code in 2017 and I don't
think that any of the projects accepted were ever on the TODO list.
In running GSoC last year and reading through all of the documentation
provided by Google about how to run GSoC successfully and what they're
looking for in terms of a project list made me realize that the areas I
mention above are really key to success.

The projects proposed through GSoC are, necessairly, constrained to what
can be done in a single summer (or, at least, serious progress being
made), but that's actually a good thing because it means that the
projects are sized well- large enough to be interesting and serious
features while small enough for someone relatively new to the community.
The "easy" things tend to be done by regular hackers, the really hard
stuff is too big for a beginner to start with.

To that end, let me just say that I strongly encourage anyone who is
interested in hacking on PG to please feel free to review what's on the
GSoC 2018 page and feel free to reach out to me if you're interested in
working on it, even if you aren't planning to participate in GSoC 2018.
We can come up with other things for GSoC students to work on, I
believe, even if half of the items currently listed there get picked up
on by non-GSoC individuals.

For the regular hackers, when you see something that's really hard on
the TODO list, please mark it as such instead of just deciding that the
list is useless. If we could quantify the level of effort required,
that'd be even better. Ultimately, I think it'd be fantastic to have a
wiki page for each item on the TODO list that describes the project
itself, what's been discussed (with links to those discussions) and what
areas could use more exploration.

The way forward, at least from my perspective, is to try and improve the
list, not to throw it away. I'd love to, one day, be able to go through
the TODO list and find the links to GSoC-sized projects to build the
yearly GSoC page with instead of having to make it an independent
effort.

Lastly, as a reminder, we will be submitting for GSoC 2018 soon, so
please put your GSoC-sized ideas on the GSoC 2018 page:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2018

and feel free to put them on the TODO list too...

Thanks!

Stephen