Re: SE-PostgreSQL?

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:06 PM, David Fetter<david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> At this point, SE-PostgreSQL has taken up a *lot* of community
> resources, not to mention an enormous and doubtless frustrating amount
> of Kohei-san's time and effort, thus far without a single committed
> patch, or even a consensus as to what it should (or could) do.
>
> Rather than continuing to blunder into the future, I think we need to
> do a reality check in the form of a couple of questions:
>
> 1.  Among the committers who could maintain the features, whatever
> they turn out to be, who is actually volunteering to do so?
>
> 2.  Apart from Kohei-san and Stephen Frost, is anybody actually
> interested in having this feature at all?
>
> I would submit that if we get fewer than three enthusiastic, "me!"s on
> the first, or fewer people than five on the second, we just need to
> bounce this feature and move on.  As I see it, those numbers are a
> bare minimum, although one could fairly argue that I've underestimated
> the minimum for the second.

I count zero for the first question and five for the second, although
two of those five (Josh Berkus and Ron Mayer) expressed doubt about
this patch set as an implementation of this feature, and only one
person (Greg Williamson) volunteered to help. I think, though, that
we have on the other thread gotten closer to a solution to some of the
problems that have been plaguing this feature, including, in
particular, the need for a clear spec and very complete docs.

I think the best thing for this patch right now is to move it to
"Returned with Feedback". I can't see any way that this patch is
going to be made committable for this CommitFest, and I think that
pretending otherwise is only encouraging KaiGai to do another of his
lighting rework-and-resubmits. While those are very impressive,
they're not getting us where we need to be. I think that what KaiGai
needs to do here is get the spec written (with the help of Greg
Williamson and anyone else who is willing to pitch in), and submit it
for comments. I don't think there will be a problem getting that
reviewed outside of a CommitFest, and it's not a patch anyway, so the
time that it gets submitted is not crucial. What is crucial is that
it is a good spec that everyone can read, and hopefully understand and
discuss. There is no point writing any more code, or submitting any
more patches, until we have agreement on what those patches are
supposed to do.

I am going to go ahead and mark this as "Returned with Feedback".

...Robert