Re: Spoofing as the postmaster

On Sat, 29 Dec 2007, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> "they've" has the potential to be "we"... As I recall the individual
> made a reasonable effort to introduce the work that he was doing to the
> community.

After a bit of hindsight research, I think SE-PostgreSQL suffered from two
timing problems combined with a cultural misperception. The first timing
issue was that those messages went out just as the 8.3 feature freeze was
going on. I know I looked at their stuff for a bit at that point,
remembered I had patches to work on, and that was it at that point. The
second problem is that just after the first message to the list came out,
RedHat released RHEL 5.0, which did a major reworking of SELinux that
everyone could for production systems immediately. I know all my SELinux
time at that point immediately switched to working through the major
improvements RHEL5 made rather than thinking about their project.

The cultural problem is that their deliverable was a series of RPM
packages (for Fedora 7, ack). They also have a nice set of user
documentation. But you can't send a message to this hackers list asking
for feedback and hand that over as your reference. People here want code.
When I wander through the threads that died, I think this message shows
the mismatch best:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-04/msg00722.php

When Tom throws out an objection that a part of the design looks sketchy,
the only good way to respond is to throw the code out and let him take a
look. I never saw the SE-PostgreSQL group even showing diffs of what they
did; making it easy to get a fat context diff (with a bit more context
than usual) would have done wonders for their project. You're not going
to get help from this community if people have to install a source RPM and
do their own diff just to figure out what was changed from the base.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD