Re: [HACKERS] blog post on ancient history

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.

regards, tom lane