I agree with your intent but some of the motivation is wrong. The public Google patch has always been a gigantic diff except for a few large features that were extracted. The Facebook patch isn't really a patch. It is a launchpad branch. Percona maintained patches. That must have been a lot of work on their part. Maybe they won't spend as much time on it going forward now that there is Percona server.
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:27 PM, Kristian Nielsen <kniel...@knielsen-hq.org> wrote: > Zardosht Kasheff <zardo...@gmail.com> writes: > >> I have spent some of my spare time looking into this. It turns out >> that MySQL Cluster already has this ability. They have the following >> handler functions listed below. I spent a weekend trying to port MySQL >> Cluster's alter table function (mysql_alter_table) over to 5.1.46. > >> - All storage engines use the new alter table, I want storage engines >> to opt in, to reduce the risk of bugs >> >> Any thoughts? > > Yes. I think you should use the new interface for everything. I remember when > we did this work in cluster (I did the low-end table change part), and the > alter table interface was designed as a general solution, not something to be > used only for some special engines. > > I understand of course why you want to "reduce risk". This has been the > approach taken with much community development in the last couple of years > (Percona patches, Google patches, Facebook patches, etc): maintain isolated > patches, trying to minimise the impact of each patch on the code base to keep > things manageable as individual patches and reduce risk and effort needed. > > But recently I see so much community development happening that I believe it > is necessary to move to the next phase. With your work, the Facebook group, my > group at Monty Program, Perconas work, and other stuff, the development effort > outside of my...@oracle is on the same order of magnitude as that > inside. Maintaining individual patches does not scale to that level of effort, > in my opinion. > > Until my...@oracle opens up their development to outside groups, we need > another solution. I spend the first year on MariaDB just working to make > everything we need available for full-scale development on the MySQL codebase > for just this reason. > > But I recognise that there is still something missing for MariaDB to be > useable for Facebook, Percona, you, etc. I think maybe it is the release > model, if so we can fix it. Or use something else, it does not have to be > MariaDB, but I strongly believe we need to coordinate our efforts. Within the > next 6 months or so we have the merge with all of our still into MySQL 5.5 > coming up, that will take considerable effort and is not something we should > each repeat individually. > > So we need to find a model that works for all you people out in the trenches > needing to put things in production use ASAP. But you guys also need at some > point to start spending the extra effort to test, fix, and integrate new > things properly, otherwise we end up with a huge spaghetti of patches that > cannot be maintained. Define "properly"? I suspect you mean that you want us to spend the time to get our changes into MariaDB. While that would be a good thing to do, I don't think that makes it proper. Getting changes from my team into MariaDB is more about helping others use those changes than it is about making my work easier. I maintain a branch on launchpad, not a set of patches. It isn't that hard to maintain them although merging to 5.5 might be some work. Pushing patches from Facebook to anybody else is extra work. I don't have time to do it. I try to make it easy to pull them. -- Mark Callaghan mdcal...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~maria-developers Post to : maria-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~maria-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
