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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
