Re: Discontent with development process (was:Re: pgaccess

Tom Lane wrote:
> Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> writes:
> > Although this config file stuff is small potatoes compared to the
> > Win32 stuff as recently discussed.  And for that, please understand
> > that most of the developers here consider Win32 an inferior server
> > platform.  In fact, Win32 _is_ an inferior server platform, at least
> > in my opinion.  But, if you want to do the work, and it doesn't break
> > my non-Win32 server build, by all means go for it.
>
> Note that "doesn't break non-Win32 builds" is not really the standard
> that will get applied.  Ongoing readability and maintainability of the
> codebase is a very high priority in my eyes, and I think in the eyes
> of most of the key developers.  To the extent that Win32 support can
> be added without hurting those goals, I have nothing against it.
   The  tricky  twist  will  be  to  keep good readability while   taking different solution approaches  for  different
Systems   (e.g.  fork()  only for *NIX vs. CreateProcess() for Win).  I   agree that your high priority goal is a  good
one.  Thinking   about good old Unix semantics, having a higher priority means   not beeing as nice as others, right?
Then again,  even  with   the  lowest possible nice level a process doesn't own the CPU   exclusively (so it never
becomesrude).
 

> I'll even put up with localized ugliness (see the BeOS support hacks
> for an example of what I'd call localized ugliness).  But I get unhappy
> when there's airy handwaving about moving all static variables into some
> global data structure, to take just one of the points that were under
> discussion last week.  That'd be a big maintainability penalty IMHO.
   As I understood it  the  idea  was  to  put  the  stuff,  the   backends  inherit  from  the  postmaster,  into a
centralized  place, instead of having it spread out all  over  the  place.   What's wrong with that?
 

> As for the more general point --- my recollection of that thread was
> that mlw himself was more than a bit guilty of adopting a "my way or no
> way" attitude; if he sees some pushback from the other developers maybe
> he should consider the possibility that he's creating his own problem.
> In general this development community is one of the most civilized I've
> ever seen.  I don't think it's that hard to get consensus on most
> topics.  The consensus isn't always the same as my personal opinion...
> but that's the price of being part of a community.
   Yeah, maybe democracy wasn't such a perfect idea at all ...


Jan ;-)

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