On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 12:47:14AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > "Jim C. Nasby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Yes, but the list being discussed is SoC projects that the community > > would like to see done, which means most people would assume that #1 > > isn't an issue. > > > We need to make sure that every project on the list of SoC ideas is > > supported by the community. > > Agreed, except that in most cases a one-liner description of an idea > isn't enough to get a meaningful reading on whether people think it's > sane or not. To take our current example: do you think a one-liner > description of full disjunctions would have gotten any feedback, except > for requests for more detail? > > I'm not sure how we fix that --- laying out every acceptable project > in great detail in advance won't happen for lack of manpower, and wouldn't > be a good idea even if we could do it, because that sounds like a great > way to stifle creativity. At the same time we can hardly promise to > accept every wild-west idea that someone manages to turn into some kind > of code. What can we tell the students other than "get as much feedback > as you can, as early as you can"?
I agree we certainly don't want to go designing these projects in advance, but I think we could at least ensure that the community buys into the concept of each project. ISTM one of the big issues with FD is that most people didn't even really understand what exactly it was or how it might be useful, which made getting broad acceptance even harder. For example, these TODOs seem like they have good acceptance by the community (though they might not be good SoC projects for other reasons): Simplify ability to create partitioned tables Allow auto-selection of partitioned tables for min/max() operations Allow commenting of variables in postgresql.conf to restore them to defaults Examples of ideas that might not be good because it's unclear that the community supports them: Stop-on-a-dime partial vacuum Adding a replication solution to the backend Putting time travel support back in Granted, the 'not good idea' list is pretty exaggerated simply because it's not as easy to find examples of that on the TODO list, since stuff on the TODO list is generally supported. Some of the 'temporal database' items that had been suggested probably fall into the category of 'might be a good idea, but the community hasn't decided that yet'. So maybe we should be limiting SoC projects to stuff that's already on the TODO list.. -- Jim Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
