On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 11:06 AM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > > 2) (a) Some hackers want the feature gone so they can implement changes > > without making those changes cooperate with this feature. (b) Bugs in > > this > > feature make such cooperation materially harder. > > I think the a) part is a large problem. Primarily because it's so > unclear what one exactly has to do where (no docs/comments explaining > that) and because there's no usable test framework.
Right. This is what I meant yesterday, when talking about design issues. It's really not about the bugs so much. We probably could go through them one by one until things stopped being visibly broken, without going to a huge amount of trouble -- it's not that hard to paper over these things without anybody noticing. This is clear just when you look at how long it took anybody to notice the problems we do have. Whether or not that amounts to "just fixing the bugs" is perhaps open to interpretation. Either way I would not be comfortable with even claiming that "fixing the bugs" in this way actually makes the situation better overall -- it might make it even worse. So in a more fundamental sense it would actually be really hard to fix these bugs. I would never have confidence in a fix like that. I really don't see a way around it -- we have to declare technical debt bankruptcy here. Whether or not that means reverting the feature or rewriting it from scratch remains to be seen. That's another question entirely, and has everything to do with somebody's willingness to adopt the project and little to do with how any individual feels about it -- just like with a new feature. It does us no good to put off the question indefinitely. -- Peter Geoghegan
