Re: [HACKERS] blog post on ancient history

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 22:55, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> >> Anyone feels in mood for a comment?
>>
>> > I see our mailing list archives for pgsql-hackers only go back to
>> > 1997, so it's hard to track down what was going on in 1996.  But as
>> > for why no one remembers the guy, it's probably because we've had
>> > nearly 100% churn in the set of people who are involved.  Tom Lane
>> > isn't mentioned in the commit log until 1998.  We could see if Bruce
>> > or Marc remember him, but just to put this in perspective, the guy
>> > made 6 commits out of almost 900 that year.
>>
>> According to the logs there was a seventh patch committed for him by
>> Marc, but still: seven patches, touching only libpq and psql (not by any
>> means as "internal" as this blogger thinks), committed over a period of
>> about a month.  That's not exactly a large or sustained contribution.
>> Is it surprising that everyone had forgotten it a few years later?
>>
>> > I don't think we had the
>> > same standards for granting commit access back then that we do now.
>>
>> Yeah, the only thing that's even mildly surprising is that he seems to
>> have been given commit privileges after only one patch.  However,
>> there's an indication in one of the commit messages that he'd previously
>> contributed to the code while Berkeley had it:
>>
>> 1996-07-25 02:46  julian
>>
>>       * src/bin/psql/psql.c: Large re-write/enhancement. In pg-101 Jolly
>>       only included a smaller part of my (proff) patch. This is the rest
>>       of it, with a few, mainly aesthetic changes. I've removed a lot of
>>       redundency from the original code, added support for the new
>>       PQprint() routines in libpq, expanded tables, and a few generally
>>       nifty ways of massaging data in and out of the backend. Still needs
>>       some good stress testing.
>>
>> so maybe that history had something to do with it.
>
> The spring/summer of 1996 was a time when we were trying to gather all
> the scattered work of people who had created patches to Postgres95 but
> had not been integrated by Jolly.  Seems Julian had been in that group
> so his patches were quickly applied.  If he had asked for commit, I
> would have given it to him because he had a history of contributing to
> the project (which I could not confirm).
>
> FYI, I do think I have an archive of much of the pg95-dev(at)ki(dot)net on a
> DAT tape in my basement, and I have an unpowered computer down there
> with a DAT tape drive ... hmmm.

Interesting.. In MBOX format? Some time when you're bored, it might be
interesting to recover those and put them up on
archives.postgresql.org!

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/