On 8/26/06, Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
this is inaccurate, irresponsible and insulting to those of us who spend time maintaining pgfoundry.
Andrew, I'm sorry if it sounded that way... it wasn't meant as such.
It is not a graveyard. Plenty of stuff outside the core gets included in packaged distributions - just see for example what goes into the Windows distro, or the packages that CP distributes.
I'm not saying that *everything* on pgfoundry is junk... but I can start naming dead projects if you'd like. It's like SourceForge before SourceForge jumped the shark... now 90% of SourceForge is either projects dead-and-gone or which hadn't even started. It's almost not even worth the time to search SF.net anymore. I believe that's the direction pgfoundry is headed. Not because of poor management or administration... just that when you have a large number of projects, the majority of which are dead or not even worth viewing, it takes the credibility of the site down as a whole. Look at gborg... there was some good stuff there and there still is; if you already know about it. Both gborg and pgfoundry have projects on there won't even work with a current version of PostgreSQL. Outside of all us hackers... how many people actually use pgfoundry? Does anyone have the stats? Has anyone polled users? How many of the users are newbies and how many are already familiar with PostgreSQL? If we don't have these basic answers, continuing to praise pgfoundry as the home for all-things-PostgreSQL is pointless.
The implication of your statement is that anything not accepted into the core is automatically somehow considered unworthy.
Not at all. I'm referring to this case in particular.
Please refer to Tom's recent remarks about playing on extensibility as one of our strengths.
I never said it wasn't... extensibility is, IMHO, our *core* strength. However, I don't think that's a good reason for pushing everything to pgfoundry.
My impression (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that proper full disjunction support would include grammar support, in which case contrib is not where it should belong anyway. If that's so, then the next step would be for somebody to pick up the work that Tzahi has done and take it the rest of the way. That would be a worth goal for 8.3.
You are correct, a *full* implementation would most likely include integration into the core; grammar and all. However, being as it's an entirely new feature in any database system ever seen, I don't think it should be required. It's kind of funny though; it's difficult enough to convince -hackers to adopt a feature that every other database system in the world has, yet we're going to make it even more difficult for an innovative feature. I can only imagine trying to get a consensus on the grammar and implementation of a totally nonstandard feature that only a few people really understand. As I see it, the full disjunction code will likely end up being a low profile project on pgfoundry because Tzahi won't have time to continue maintaining it and not many of us have enough insight into it to do so ourselves. As such, I don't think it's going to get enough attention and enough of a user following to make it worth the time of one of the core developers to pick it up. Of course, I may always be wrong. Perhaps pgfoundry is more popular than I've seen in past experience. Maybe one of the core developers does want to pick up full disjunctions for 8.3. Guess we'll just have to wait and see... -- Jonah H. Harris, Software Architect | phone: 732.331.1300 EnterpriseDB Corporation | fax: 732.331.1301 33 Wood Ave S, 2nd Floor | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Iselin, New Jersey 08830 | http://www.enterprisedb.com/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
