Re: Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2

On 6/12/05 5:16 pm, "Josh Berkus" <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:

> Well, unfortunately no spec document ever came out of dicussion on this list.

I've never seen a spec document produced for anything that postgresql.org
has done, on the web side or the backend server. I'm sure some (maybe all)
of the companies involved might produce them for things they work on, but I
never saw anything on -hackers.

> In fact, I was on this list for that discussion, and my recall of it is that
> there was a lot of shooting the breeze but no real decisions were actually
> made. At least, nothing that had a consensus behind it.

Hmm, last week you told me you didn't recall any discussions on the subject
at all.

> One of the big issues -- in fact, THE big issue -- with increasing
> participation in WWW administration is the total and complete lack of
> documentation for any WWW decisions, infrastructure, or code. While I can
> understand lagging in documenting stuff (like, I have a draft of the release
> PR procedure I have yet to discuss online despite being on my HDD for a
> month), it's extremely irrational for people on this list to pitch a fit at
> potential contributors for not psychically understanding what WWW wants or
> not reading the WWW list back to the beginning of time.

That is not the issue. Whilst you may have forgotten the discussions, others
were most certainly aware of the ongoing project that had evolved from them.
*That* is the issue, not the detail, which I'm happy to summarise as
required.

> That is, it's one thing to say: "Hey, you should probably read this thread, we
> already discussed it here ____________", and another thing entirely to say
> "You asshole! We already decided that, why didn't you pay attention!"
> Currently, this list has an awful lot of the former.

Eh? You want us to do the latter, or is that a typo? If it is a typo, then
I'd like to see where any of us have been downright rude about it as you
suggest.

> This isn't just the KB. It affects the whole web infrastructure. For
> example, we've been running on the new web site code for almost 2 years, and
> how many translations of the site have there been? Exactly none. Why?
> Zero documentation on how to translate the site.

No. Alexey wrote up the details and added them to CVS (I think at your
request, but I might be mistaken about that). I can certainly recall at
least a couple of occasions where we've pointed you at that doc when you've
asked about it over the last year. Oh, and it's less than a year, not nearly
2 - I know that because we pushed it live just after new year so it was
there for 8.0's release.

> If our project can insist that all database code patches come with full
> documentation, I think maybe it's time that we start insisting that all WWW
> patches come with documentation.

No problem with that - though it will be documentation through code
comments. It's not like we require docs on how the code works for anything
else, only for the end user functionality.

Regards, Dave