Great email, Kathey, thanks, and thanks for *all* your hard work for
this project!
David
Kathey Marsden wrote:
This was in a thread about getGeneratedKeys()
Lance J. Andersen wrote about JDBC spec and compatibility discussions:
the discussions are healthy though to not just jump into the fire, i
just wish there were more people contributing besides us sometimes....
Kathey wrote:
Well it just takes time I think and sometimes it is like the hard work
of rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. Once it catches,
watch out!
Here are some examples ....
1) I used to think I was one of a very few that cared at about
compatibility. I'd wake up each day to new proposals like: "Today
let's change the internal DRDAID to and break every client in the
world" or "Lets add a new security permission that needs to be in every
deployed policy file". Now I see lots of folks working on compat.
Dave published the guidelines. Rick immediately asked with this issue
if it was ok to change in 10.2 and talked about polling the user
community. Lots of developers are thinking about it with their
changes. No good testing yet though. There is far to go.
2) I used to think I was one of a very few that cared about all of the
outstanding defects piling up.
But in 10.1.3 I saw 90 bugs fixed and contributions from 36 developers
and testers from all over the world.
3) Two weeks ago I thought I was one of very few who cared about Jira
Maintenance and having the data mean anything. I put out some reports
but no bites. This week, Rick put out a request and Andrew helped
facilitate with easy links. I went to a meeting and came back to a mass
Jira mail attack from folks cleaning up issues.
4) Earlier this week I thought I was one of the very few that cared
about quick patch turnaround and patch list maintenance.
Oh well, there are still 22 outstanding. Next week who knows.
The sad thing is there is a really long list of very important things
that really need to be on the right people's radar. Getting them in
the hands of the right people who care and presented in a way that is
meaningful to them is hard. This community is preparing for an
explosion of users and developers too, I think, as folks want to come
in, fix their bug and get out. My opinion is that we are not at all
nearly prepared on many fronts, from community issues like patch
turnaround and code formatting trip wires to really serious bugs like
the corruption caused by DERBY-700, security issues like DERBY-65/528
and low hanging fruit serious compliance issues like DERBY-790. How
important are those relative to changing getGeneratedKeys()? Different
for each person I guess.
But we need to keep on communicating and try to find new ways to frame
these issues in the right way and provide easy access to the people
care. As soon as you showed me a user hitting trouble with
getGeneratedKeys() you softened me up #:). Maybe there is a Wiki page
you could make to bring attention to JDBC compliance issues and Derby
too. This would help to give us the big picture of what the
outstanding issues are.
Kathey
