Re: running script on server shutdown (TODO)

On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 11:55 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> That seems unlikely to improve the quality of the list :-(. With the
> present process, entries are made after some discussion on the mailing
> list, and at least most of the time there's some consensus that an idea
> is good. With a wiki, anyone could stick an item on there with no peer
> review.

In practice, I really doubt that people are going to spend their time
adding suboptimal entries to the TODO list. If the document is regularly
read and edited by multiple developers (as would be the case if it was
used at all), I think the clearly bad ideas would be rooted out quickly,
and the "not terrible but not clearly worthwhile" ideas would have the
necessary caveats.

> The real problem that I see is that Bruce abstracts the discussions
> down into one-line summaries that frequently omit critical information.

I agree, but I think this is another symptom of having only one person
maintain the list. It is a non-trivial amount of work to understand all
the arguments in a complex -hackers thread and distill that into a few
accurate sentences that summarize the consensus (if there even was
one!). I'm not at all surprised when the TODO entry that results is
incomplete or misleading if the person doing the summary wasn't one of
the primary participants in the -hackers thread.

Short of going to a wiki, I think we can at least make it easier for
other committers to modify the TODO list. What format is doc/TODO in,
anyway? (It doesn't seem to be normal plaintext.) Why is there also an
HTML copy of the TODO list (doc/src/FAQ/TODO.html) kept in CVS? (I'd
rather we not keep generated files in CVS, in general.)

I think a concrete improvement would be to get rid of all that, and
maintain a master copy of the TODO list in some sane format -- or
failing that, DocBook :)

-Neil