Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I don't think anybody is arguing for a radical change in culture - > certainly I would not be so presumptuous after only a couple of years > :-) But a roadmap could be useful in many ways. It need not tie anybody > down, if positioned right, but can help people to see where things are > going, and where the gaps are. This could in a sense be as simple as > prioritising the TODO list.
I think that even getting that done would turn into a flamew^H^H^H^Hhuge distraction. The way things really work around here is that individual developers have their own priorities and they work on what seems most important to them at the time. (In some cases those priorities may be set by their companies more than by the individuals, but that's irrelevant from the community's perspective.) ISTM any sort of project-wide prioritization would be either (1) meaningless or (2) a guaranteed-to-fail attempt to assert control over other contributors. But the TODO list could certainly be made more informative without getting into that swamp. I don't think it does very well at conveying the relative sizes of the work items, nor the extent to which there is consensus about how particular problems ought to be solved (the fact that something is on TODO does not necessarily mean that all the major contributors have bought into it...). And of course you're right that it tells nothing at all about whether progress is currently being made on a given item. The markers indicating that someone has expressed interest in an item don't mean they are actively doing anything with it. The real difficulty here is exactly what Lamar noted: who's going to do the work? Bruce seems to be swamped already, so we'd need a new volunteer to maintain a more useful TODO list, and there doesn't seem to be anyone who wants to do it and has the depth of familiarity with the project to do a good job of it. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend