Re: pgFoundry

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:

> >>No that is public presentation of the project not project development.
> > I don't see that people are going to be able to participate in development
> > if they don't use the mailing lists.
>
> I am not arguing that but public mailing lists are no place to track status of
> sub projects or tasks. They are for discussion.

What does it mean to "track" the status of something? How would the status
change except by discussion? What would be the point of announcing the status
of something without allowing people to comment?

I think you have a severely flawed idea of how free software development
proceeds. What you're describing sounds like something a manager of a
commercial project would want. Perhaps it's something the managers of the
people working on Postgres on behalf of some corporate sponsors might want but
in those cases I doubt they would want the information to be public anyways.

In the free software world there's no top-down management of the project with
managers issuing direction and expecting feedback reports. People only want
tools that make their lives easier. Not tools that make other people's lives
easier at the expense of their own convenience. The programmers are not
beholden to any corporate interests (other than their own sponsors, who
presumably are getting all the feedback they're looking for privately).

I'm rather surprised Postgres doesn't have a good bug tracking system. That's
something most projects find pretty essential. Strangely enough the reason
seems to be that Postgres really doesn't have many bugs... Unlike web browsers
or GUIs or most of the other free software projects out there, databases don't
tolerate bugs well. Any serious bug is cause for an immediate point release.
The only use for a bug tracking system would really be for tracking all those
pesky "IWBNI" bugs that never rise to urgent status.

But "tracking the status" of sub-projects is just not the kind of thing free
software people do. They send emails when they have something to say.

--
greg