Re: Getting a move on for 8.2 beta

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 10:13:07PM -0400, Jonah H. Harris wrote:
> On 9/1/06, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> >I pummelled Jonah over the recursive query patch.
>
> He did. Trust me on this... think I still have some bruises too :)

That wasn't productive. Getting it out in public that your available
time didn't match the size of the project in, say, February or even
April, would have been.

> >Neither effort was very fruitful, but tracking wasn't what made
> >them fail. I am not saying tracking is wrong, but rather tracking
> >would not have helped make these things happen faster.
>
> This is correct. I just had too much stuff to do and there wasn't
> enough time to get the hierarchical query patch worthy of someone
> spending their time on a review.

I know it's hard to judge from the inside, which is why this process
needs more public visibility, early and often, to the rest of the
community. It does nobody any good to have Bruce bawl you out
repeatedly in private, and then spring it on the rest of us in June
that you weren't even close.

> IMHO, tracking occasionally is alright. However, as a developer,
> being "pummelled" does sometimes get irritating; even to the point
> that I will sometimes discontinue working on something because it's
> too much of a hassle for me to spend my free-time on.

That's an excellent outcome for the project, by the way. When
somebody is feeling "pummeled," it's frequently a signal that they
really don't have the time they thought they did, and the sooner and
more widely such a situation is known, the better.

> Though, this was not the case for hierarchical queries at all; that
> really was due to a lack of time.
>
> There's got to be a "happy medium" in which we can keep our status
> updated without it becoming an irritation. Has anyone looked at
> something like dotProject? It may be something we could use for
> development. Of course, there's lots of other tools... but it would
> be nice if we had a central location for each task's status so that
> we don't have to resort to searching email and/or archives.

...and we're back to the infamous tarbaby of bug/issue trackers. It's
time we took that head-on instead of dancing around it.

As expressed many times earlier, such a system must be accessible,
both for read and write, by email. What other things must it do?
Should it do? Must it avoid?

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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