Re: PostgreSQL 8.4 development plan

"Fabien COELHO" <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr> writes:

> ISTM that a decentralized or distributed SCM for PostgreSQL would be a bad
> move, however great it would be at branching and merging.  For me it is a
> philosophy question: if PGSQL is a "common work", then everything should be
> open and shared, and a centralized systems make sense to embodied this. 

Well not really. Our current model is that only stuff that's ready for
widespread use goes into CVS. That means "everything" isn't open and shared at
all. "everything" is mostly sitting on people's local hard drives where you
can't use do anything with it, let alone contribute.

The patches mailing list is basically our poor-man's distributed SCM today.
It's awful since a) you never know if you're looking at the most recent
version b) updating your tree from an old version to a newer version is
painful c) people only release versions when they think they have something to
say or a question; they don't know you want to try out their stuff until you
complain about last month's silly bugs d) you never know what version of the
tree the patch was against and of course e) if you make any changes they have
all the same problems dealing with your changes to their patch.

And it's hardly any more centralized than a distributed SCM system would be.

--  Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support!