Re: Thought provoking piece on NetBSD

bruce(at)momjian(dot)us (Bruce Momjian) writes:
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> >
>> > The only part of this that I see as relevant to us is setting of
>> > development goals. And we've already discussed this ad nauseum on the
>> > Hackers list and AFAIK have an initial plan (the enhanced TODO), lacking
>> > only the resources to implement it this month.
>>
>> Almost the whole thing is relevant :). Keep in mind that I am not saying
>
> I totally agree!
>
>> that it is negative. For example the NetBSD core is obviously cranked,
>> where our Core tends to stay out of the way. That is a positive.
>>
>> On the other hand, we do suffer from the locked project problem (the
>> recent recursive query debacle is a perfect example).
>
> Yep, but fortunately this problem doesn't happen to us often.

It seems to me that PostgreSQL doesn't suffer in similar degree from
the "oh, dear, someone has that TODO item; now noone else can ever
look at it!" problem.

The recursive query situation is one where, while they may have missed
the 8.2 release, it's not as if this represents something that sat and
sat and which will see no action for 8.3 because "so and so has it on
their list..."

>> Anyway, the post as I said was for provoking thought, not for
>> antagonistic measures. I saw good and bad and thought it would be
>> good for everyone to review as we are as a project dealing with
>> some of our own growth problems.
>
> Yes. There are lessons to be learned.

I'm not sure how much can be readily learned from the "Oh, dear, we
bundle whatever features people come in with" problem. Managing a
free software project is quite a bit like herding cats; what you get
is what their wanderings resulted in.

To the degree to which people volunteer for things that strike them as
individually interesting, I don't see how you change that.

The classic item for PostgreSQL that people wish it had which has a
pretty wide-open kind of scope is the in-place upgrade. There's the
suggestion that perhaps one of the Sun folk will look at it for 8.3;
that's definitely NOT the sort of thing that fits into the
'independent volunteer noodling around with a feature they find
interesting' category.
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