Re: Gsoc XQuery

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> Necati Batur escribió:
>
>> *Delivarables on Timeline*
>>
>> The implementation of XQuery support can ce achieved by;
>>
>> *Understanding the basics of the SQL/XML (1 week)
>>
>> *A research of on other kinds of XQuery supported DBMSs scuh as; Oracle and
>> SQLServer(1-2 week)
>>
>> *The design for the core functionalities of the XQuery (2-4 week)
>>
>> *First few hard-coded functionalities(1-2 week)
>>
>> *Testing and adding more details during an iterative development(1-2 week)
>>
>> *Implementation of a GUI for XQuery for the PostgreSql users (2 week)
>
> What, you will *also* implement a GUI?  Gimme a break.  There's no way
> you can achieve most of these in "1-2 weeks".  Are you Tom Lane
> perchance?

I think the problem with this and the other proposal from the same
student is that, according to his submissions and statements, he
doesn't really know what the design for any of these features is going
to be. So his plan is to first figure out the design, and then
implement it. I don't believe he's done any work reading through
existing mailing list discussions, wiki pages, or even maybe our core
documentation. I believe we should really be expecting students to
have a fairly detailed design at the time they submit the project -
the summer is for implementing it, not for figuring out what "it" is
and then implementing it.

This might be just barely acceptable if he started with a small
project for which we already pretty much know what the design has to
be. But for a major undertaking like the two he's proposed so far,
you can't think that you're going to start with hand-waving and end up
with something useful.

...Robert