Re: commit fests

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> What I find takes up a lot of time is post-commit patch review, fixing
> reported bugs, and documentation cleanup.  Now we could doubtless find
> other people to do the purely copy-editing aspects of doc cleanup, like
> fixing less-than-stellar English, but what I'm really looking for is
> factually incorrect or obsolete statements.  It takes someone who's
> pretty much familiar top-to-bottom with the whole product to do a decent
> job of spotting things that were true awhile ago but aren't any longer.
> We just don't have many people who (a) can and (b) will do that work.

So I've never seen this mentioned before. In retrospect I remember you
popping up with such things but I don't recall discussion of what work
remained and which sections of the docs or commits you've finished
with so far, etc. That makes it hard for anyone else to help the work
go any faster.

Would it be helpful if we divided up the manual and handed out
sections to different people? Or if you could note that something
sounded wrong and then, at least for some of them just send a quick
email noting the section and anyone else could write up the changes?
Obviously in some cases the changes will be minor but in others whole
examples might need to be rewritten or new sections added.



> What I think we really need for beta, and could reasonably hope to get,
> is a larger and better-organized beta testing effort.  But we are not
> going to get that if people are thinking about new development and
> commit fests instead of testing what's already there.

Incidentally I'm not convinced that's true. The people we really want
testing stuff are the people who have real-world test cases to throw
at the new version and they're the people who will be most excited
about a new release and the least interested in a commitfest for a
version that they won't be able to run for another year. We have a
hard enough time getting people to not wait until the last commitfest
after all.

But I would be happy getting our current process working perfectly
before trying experiments like that.


--
greg