Re: TODO system WAS: 8.2 features status

Neil, all:

> If people are interested in the status of a patch, I think it's fine for
> them to email the person who's volunteered to work on it.

The problem I would like to see resolved is that there is currently no
accurate way to determine who is working on a patch except by comprehensive
-hackers, -patches, and -performance archive reading. This is a little
daunting for people who just joined the community, or who are users just
wanting to know if someone is working on a feature they want.

I doubt that any TODO system would have 100% participation, and I know that it
would depend on having some non-hacker volunteers updating the information on
behalf of developers who didn't want to use it. However, I think that
getting those volunteers is entirely possible (for example, PWN is inculding
a weekly patch list and it's not much more effort to check off those patches
against a web-based TODO list). If the system reflected 70% of current
development activity, then I think it would be a big improvement over the
current "read 100% of the mail archives for three mailing lists back one year
to find out what's going on."

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco