commitfest.postgresql.org

[slakr]

> I *am* using some kind of key.  Specifically, in integer derived from
> a serial column.  It's just as stable as 16 random bytes displayed in
> hex, but a lot shorter and easier to remember, if you're the sort of
> person who likes to remember URLs.  :-)
>

Wasn't aware of exately what you were doing.  It sounded like multiple
things were in the query_string.  If its already a single key, than
there is no need to use a different key.  And no, I don't like
remebering URLs ... thus all the fuss about breaking bookmarks ;-)

 >>>> It's impossible to know that this is commitfest 2009-07.
 >>>>
 >>> commitfest.postgresql.org/2009/07 ?
 >>>
 >>> That, or any similar scheme, seems easily doable with a
 >>> little apache rewrite magic and some programming. See my
 >>> blog urls for one such example.
>> IMHO, I don't see much gain to encoding the date into the url either. This
>> is not a great way of telling the user when something occurred.  A lookup is
>> going to occur either way, so why not get all data at once using a single
>> method?
>
> Sorry, I'm not following this part.

Using a URL to encode when something occurred was being offered as a
solution to know what commitfest it is.  I'm not sure where your
confusion is?

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Dimitri Fontaine<dfontaine@...> wrote:
> Your software seems to be better than a wiki, but its potential users are
> expressing needs and bikescheding. I think you'd better accept both kind of
> changes as long as it's not making your life much harder than you'd want.
> Frankly, what URL looks better:
>  http://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view?id=2
>  http://commitfest.postgresql.org/2009/07

We've definitely gotten to the "harder than I'd want" point at this point.

> Oh, and while at it, I don't foresee that we would want the commitfest of
> july 2009 to change its name but not the "semantic" URL pointing to its
> management. Or if it's ever wanted, as has been said, have a look at Apache
> Rewrite Rules system, it's made for supporting content being moved.
> Something in the spirit of:
>  RedirectPermanent /2009/07 /2009/08

I humbly submit that it's insane to thing about editing httpd.conf
every time somebody renames an object.  The point here is to *reduce*
the administrative burden of maintaining this thing.

> While at it, I imagine that within a given commit fest, a single patch will
> have a stable shortname, or if it comes to change, we could accept that the
> URL too change:
>  http://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/patch_view?id=71
>  http://commitfest.postgresql.org/2009/07/Synch_Rep
>  http://commitfest.postgresql.org/current/Synch_Rep
>
> Now, rather than following the names with apache setup, maybe you could add
> something like some history tables tracking short name changes (maybe some
> ON UPDATE trigger would do), so that referring to an older name would send a
> HTTP 302 redirect to the new name URL?

So, the good thing about the current system is that the URL *doesn't*
change and you *don't* need complicated bookkeeping to remember every
URL you've ever assigned to the thing to get it.  I am well aware that
it's possible to design a system that does this, but what benefit do
we get out of it?  Making it possible to tell what a URL points to
without clicking on it, for those occasions when you're stranded on a
desert island with a URL and no Internet access?

There's a subtle and pernicious danger of the system you're proposing,
too.  If we regularly change the URLs that refer to certain objects,
but compensate for that by remembering the whole history of URLs that
have ever referred to that object, then there will multiple URLs that
refer to the same object, of which all but one will contain WRONG
information about what that link points to.  The
http://commitfest.postgresql.org/2009/07/Sync_Rep link, for example,
might imply to someone that the patch is in the 2009-07 commitfest,
but in fact it may well have been moved to the 2009-11, 2010-01, or
2010-03 commitfest, or we might have finally come to our senses and
realized that it ought to be called "streaming rep" and rename it.

It's true that the current URLs, without some sort of accompanying
text, do not tell you what they point to.  But no information can
often be better than disinformation.

> I'd like your work to be useful for all of us and appreciated to its real
> value, and those changes well seem like user interface improvements rather
> than basic structure or behavior questioning.

I'd like that, too.

...Robert

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Andrew Chernow<ac@...> wrote:

>> I *am* using some kind of key.  Specifically, in integer derived from
>> a serial column.  It's just as stable as 16 random bytes displayed in
>> hex, but a lot shorter and easier to remember, if you're the sort of
>> person who likes to remember URLs.  :-)
>>
>
> Wasn't aware of exately what you were doing.  It sounded like multiple
> things were in the query_string.  If its already a single key, than there is
> no need to use a different key.  And no, I don't like remebering URLs ...
> thus all the fuss about breaking bookmarks ;-)

Right.  The current system has exactly ZERO chance of breaking any
bookmarks, and all of the proposed alternatives are much more likely
to do so.

>>>>> It's impossible to know that this is commitfest 2009-07.
>>>>>
>>>> commitfest.postgresql.org/2009/07 ?
>>>>
>>>> That, or any similar scheme, seems easily doable with a
>>>> little apache rewrite magic and some programming. See my
>>>> blog urls for one such example.
>>>
>>> IMHO, I don't see much gain to encoding the date into the url either.
>>> This
>>> is not a great way of telling the user when something occurred.  A lookup
>>> is
>>> going to occur either way, so why not get all data at once using a single
>>> method?
>>
>> Sorry, I'm not following this part.
>
> Using a URL to encode when something occurred was being offered as a
> solution to know what commitfest it is.  I'm not sure where your confusion
> is?

The suggestion was to encode the start date of the CommitFest in the
URL, instead of using a non-natural key.

...Robert

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[Tom Lane-2]

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> writes:
> Backing up for a moment to ten thousand feet here, I posted a link to
> this web app on May 26th.  I received several comments on it, all of
> them positive, including some constructive feedback from you which I
> took to heart.  It is now July 1st, and I am trying very hard to get
> ready for the next CommitFest, which I have agreed to manage.  So I
> need to determine whether there is some finite number of changes of
> manageable size that I can make to get this to a state where we can
> use it, or whether I should give up hope now and go back to the wiki.

I think it's probably fixable, if you've got some time to put into it
between now and the 15th.  What's being griped about is user interface
details, and it's not surprising that you as the author didn't see
these things the same way a new user would.  From what I've been able to
see, the underlying functionality is mostly there, but it needs some
usability/presentation tweaking.

> I accept the need for and am willing to make the following changes:

> - Changing the patch comment field from type text to type textarea and
> integrating it into the patch view page to provide context.
> - Adding a note to the effect that the message ID is optional.
> - Adding stable links with mnemonic names for the open, in progress,
> and most recently closed commitfests.

> With respect to the issue of the page URLs, I'm very unconvinced of
> the value of making a change.

Given your item 3 above, I think we can live with the URLs otherwise.

One other thing I was noticing is that the items for a particular patch
seem to be listed in reverse date order.  Personally I find this strange
and would prefer newest-at-the-bottom --- in particular, having the
patch itself at the bottom doesn't seem especially usable.  We might
need to take a vote on that though, since I suppose some people like
newest-at-the-top.

                        regards, tom lane

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@...> wrote:

> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> writes:
>> Backing up for a moment to ten thousand feet here, I posted a link to
>> this web app on May 26th.  I received several comments on it, all of
>> them positive, including some constructive feedback from you which I
>> took to heart.  It is now July 1st, and I am trying very hard to get
>> ready for the next CommitFest, which I have agreed to manage.  So I
>> need to determine whether there is some finite number of changes of
>> manageable size that I can make to get this to a state where we can
>> use it, or whether I should give up hope now and go back to the wiki.
>
> I think it's probably fixable, if you've got some time to put into it
> between now and the 15th.  What's being griped about is user interface
> details, and it's not surprising that you as the author didn't see
> these things the same way a new user would.  From what I've been able to
> see, the underlying functionality is mostly there, but it needs some
> usability/presentation tweaking.

Thanks, that is really good news.  I agree that the presentation and
usability need some work and I'm trying to address those concerns as
expediently as I can.  Part of my angst is that I am going to have
only sporadic Internet access for the next week, so what I can't get
done today (while my wife wonders why I am doing a second job on a
holiday for no money) probably isn't going to happen for a bit, and I
would like to get cut over so that Brendan doesn't have to keep
manually replicating changes between the systems.  I will see if I can
make the changes below happen today.

>> I accept the need for and am willing to make the following changes:
>
>> - Changing the patch comment field from type text to type textarea and
>> integrating it into the patch view page to provide context.
>> - Adding a note to the effect that the message ID is optional.
>> - Adding stable links with mnemonic names for the open, in progress,
>> and most recently closed commitfests.
>
>> With respect to the issue of the page URLs, I'm very unconvinced of
>> the value of making a change.
>
> Given your item 3 above, I think we can live with the URLs otherwise.

/me feels like he has dodged a bullet.

> One other thing I was noticing is that the items for a particular patch
> seem to be listed in reverse date order.  Personally I find this strange
> and would prefer newest-at-the-bottom --- in particular, having the
> patch itself at the bottom doesn't seem especially usable.  We might
> need to take a vote on that though, since I suppose some people like
> newest-at-the-top.

I think it IS newest at the bottom, and I agree that that is how it
should be.  24 hours ago it was alpha by topic and then alpha by patch
name, but now it is topic by sortorder, then topic by name, then patch
by ascending ID number (which works out to newest at the bottom).  I
thought the other way would be OK, but after Brendan and I imported
the data we both said "that sucks", so it got changed last night
around midnight Eastern +/- an hour.

One of the things that I would like to add in the future is the
ability to assign a patch a shortname.  This would be useful for
building command-line tools to interface with the system, e.g.
download the sepgsql patch.  The idea would be that these names would
be stable, though of course it's hard to see how to guarantee that
100%.  I am still trying to work out in my mind how best to set that
up, though, so it's probably not going to happen right away unless
someone else is prepared to do some of the legwork.

...Robert

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[Kevin Grittner]

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> wrote:
 
> I think it IS newest at the bottom, and I agree that that is how it
> should be.
 
It seems to be inconsistent.  Probably because everything wound up
with the same date, the order is probably more-or-less random.  What
are the chances that the date or timestamp of the corresponding wiki
modification could be put onto the patch and comment lines?  (One
would hope that could be done with a script, rather than by hand....)
 
-Kevin

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[Tom Lane-2]

"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@...> writes:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> wrote:
>> I think it IS newest at the bottom, and I agree that that is how it
>> should be.
 
> It seems to be inconsistent.  Probably because everything wound up
> with the same date, the order is probably more-or-less random.

Yeah, I think that's what I'm seeing.

> What
> are the chances that the date or timestamp of the corresponding wiki
> modification could be put onto the patch and comment lines?  (One
> would hope that could be done with a script, rather than by hand....)

Currently, it seems that most or all of the entries are links to
archived messages.  Scraping the date from the underlying message
would be the best thing.

                        regards, tom lane

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[Kevin Grittner]

Tom Lane <tgl@...> wrote:
 
> Currently, it seems that most or all of the entries are links to
> archived messages.  Scraping the date from the underlying message
> would be the best thing.
 
Just for purposes of conversion, or as a long-term behavior?
 
-Kevin

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[Tom Lane-2]

"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@...> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl@...> wrote:
>> Currently, it seems that most or all of the entries are links to
>> archived messages.  Scraping the date from the underlying message
>> would be the best thing.
 
> Just for purposes of conversion, or as a long-term behavior?

Well, right at the moment I was just thinking of the conversion problem,
but it wouldn't be a horrible idea to make it a permanent behavior for
entries that include a message reference.

                        regards, tom lane

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[Peter Eisentraut-2]

On Friday 03 July 2009 07:57:35 Robert Haas wrote:
> We're still hacking on a few other details of the formatting and
> interface, but you might want to cruise over and have a look.

One thing that I noticed it that it takes too many clicks in general to make a
set of changes.  When I look at a patch, why not have the controls to add a
comment and make changes right there, instead of on another page?  For
instance, the functionality of

action/patch_view?id=69
action/patch_comment_form?patch=69
action/patch_form?id=69
action/patch_bump?id=69

could all be on the same page.

And please make "Delete Patch" into a button instead of a link.

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[Tom Lane-2]

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@...> writes:
> And please make "Delete Patch" into a button instead of a link.

Only if there's some kind of confirmation ...

                        regards, tom lane

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[Joshua D. Drake]

On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 16:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@...> writes:
> > And please make "Delete Patch" into a button instead of a link.
>
> Only if there's some kind of confirmation ...

Should we actually delete patches? I get removing them from the list but
it seems there could be benefit from keeping patches that are not
"quite" there or perhaps present an idea that is ahead of its time (or
half baked but interesting in genera?).

+1 on the confirmation regardless.

Joshua D. Drake


>
> regards, tom lane
>
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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Joshua D. Drake<jd@...> wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 16:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@...> writes:
>> > And please make "Delete Patch" into a button instead of a link.
>>
>> Only if there's some kind of confirmation ...
>
> Should we actually delete patches? I get removing them from the list but
> it seems there could be benefit from keeping patches that are not
> "quite" there or perhaps present an idea that is ahead of its time (or
> half baked but interesting in genera?).
>
> +1 on the confirmation regardless.

There is a confirmation right now, plus it doesn't work at all unless
you delete all the comments first, which you can't do either unless
you are an administrator or the only person who has ever commented on
the patch.

Really, deleting patches should be quite rare and only needed in cases
where the patch should not have been added in the first place.

I guess I'm not really seeing why that particular thing should be a
button rather than a link.  It would mess up the formatting for no
obvious benefit.

...Robert

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[Joshua D. Drake]

On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 17:57 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:

> I guess I'm not really seeing why that particular thing should be a
> button rather than a link.  It would mess up the formatting for no
> obvious benefit.
>

Not arguing one way or the other, a button says, "I am about to perform
X". A link *always* says, "I am about to go to a new web page".

Joshua D. Drake


> ...Robert
>
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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Joshua D. Drake<jd@...> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 17:57 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>
>> I guess I'm not really seeing why that particular thing should be a
>> button rather than a link.  It would mess up the formatting for no
>> obvious benefit.
>>
>
> Not arguing one way or the other, a button says, "I am about to perform
> X". A link *always* says, "I am about to go to a new web page".

Hmm, there is some truth to what you say.  I guess the way I think
about it, a button says "I am about to submit this form" and a link
says "I am about to do something other than submit a form".  But it's
certainly an arguable point.

...Robert

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Robert Haas<robertmhaas@...> wrote:
>>> I accept the need for and am willing to make the following changes:
>>
>>> - Changing the patch comment field from type text to type textarea and
>>> integrating it into the patch view page to provide context.
>>> - Adding a note to the effect that the message ID is optional.
>>> - Adding stable links with mnemonic names for the open, in progress,
>>> and most recently closed commitfests.

Done.
Done.
Done.

You guys are harder to please than my boss.  He doesn't quite know for
sure which things are possible.  :-)

...Robert

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e@...> wrote:

> On Friday 03 July 2009 07:57:35 Robert Haas wrote:
>> We're still hacking on a few other details of the formatting and
>> interface, but you might want to cruise over and have a look.
>
> One thing that I noticed it that it takes too many clicks in general to make a
> set of changes.  When I look at a patch, why not have the controls to add a
> comment and make changes right there, instead of on another page?  For
> instance, the functionality of
>
> action/patch_view?id=69
> action/patch_comment_form?patch=69
> action/patch_form?id=69
> action/patch_bump?id=69
>
> could all be on the same page.

Well, I've added the comment form to that page, by request, but I
don't see how you could fit the rest on there in any sort of sane way.
 But I'm accepting patches...

...Robert

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[Robert Haas]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@...> wrote:
> "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@...> writes:
>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> wrote:
>>> I think it IS newest at the bottom, and I agree that that is how it
>>> should be.
>
>> It seems to be inconsistent.  Probably because everything wound up
>> with the same date, the order is probably more-or-less random.
>
> Yeah, I think that's what I'm seeing.

I think what you guys must be seeing is that the topics are not in
quite the same order.  As far as I can tell, the ordering of patches
within topics is absolutely identical.  If you see a counterexample,
please point it out.  If you want to fix the order of the topics,
click on the "CommitFest Topics" link in the upper lefthand corner of
the page and frobnicate the sort order.

>> What
>> are the chances that the date or timestamp of the corresponding wiki
>> modification could be put onto the patch and comment lines?  (One
>> would hope that could be done with a script, rather than by hand....)
>
> Currently, it seems that most or all of the entries are links to
> archived messages.  Scraping the date from the underlying message
> would be the best thing.

Brendan, is this something that you can work on?  Or does anyone else
have some time to put into it?  And do we have to fix this before we
can declare the new system live, or can we catch up after the fact?
Because replicating changes from the old system to the new is a bit of
a pain in the neck.

...Robert

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[Brendan Jurd]

2009/7/4 Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...>:

> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@...> wrote:
>> "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@...> writes:
>>> What
>>> are the chances that the date or timestamp of the corresponding wiki
>>> modification could be put onto the patch and comment lines?  (One
>>> would hope that could be done with a script, rather than by hand....)
>>
>> Currently, it seems that most or all of the entries are links to
>> archived messages.  Scraping the date from the underlying message
>> would be the best thing.
>
> Brendan, is this something that you can work on?

I will take a stab at it.  I think Tom's suggestion of harvesting the
time of the mail message from the archives could do the job.

Cheers,
BJ

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[Tom Lane-2]

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@...> writes:
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@...> wrote:
>> "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@...> writes:
>>> It seems to be inconsistent.  Probably because everything wound up
>>> with the same date, the order is probably more-or-less random.
>>
>> Yeah, I think that's what I'm seeing.

> I think what you guys must be seeing is that the topics are not in
> quite the same order.  As far as I can tell, the ordering of patches
> within topics is absolutely identical.

No, what we're complaining about is the ordering of comments for a
single patch.  If you look at
http://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view?id=2
in some cases there are Comments before the Patch itself, and in
some cases after, but more often than not the original Patch is
at the bottom.

                        regards, tom lane

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