On 09/26/2014 01:07 AM, Stephen Frost wrote:
* Simon Riggs (si...@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
My major reason to revert is the following: the documentation contains
no examples of real world usage, making the feature essentially
unusable out of the box.

I find this to be an interesting argument considering most of our
documentation doesn't include real-world examples.

+1 for adding examples.

This wouldn't be the only case of documentation (indeed, *any*
documentation) being added after a commit, and so I'm mystified by this
requirement for *real-world* examples in documentation to be provided
prior to commit.

IMO it depends on the situation. Yeah, we've had a lot of commits without docs, where the documentation has been added later. I'm OK with that, if for example the committed patch is part of a series of patches, where it doesn't make sense to add documentation until the whole series has been committed. Then there are situations where the patch author just hasn't gotten around to adding documentation yet (like in this case). That's more questionable; documentation is an important part of adding a feature, and there's the risk that the author never gets around to add documentation, after the code has been committed, or does only lip service to it. It's usually worked out fine, though - people who have successfully added major features are conscientious enough to get it done.

But in many cases, lack of good documentation make even reviewing the patch difficult. How do you determine if the patch works as intended, if you don't know what it's supposed to do?

Wrt. reverting or not, I'm strongly of the opinion that whatever. If you just add the docs, I'm happy. This is a big and security-sensitive feature, and it requires documentation not only on how to use the feature, but an introduction to what row-level security is, what level of security to expect, what circumstances you would use it in, comparison to other approaches, the side-channels, etc. We'll probably have to go through a few rounds of review on the docs alone. I'd leave it up to Stephen to decided how he wants to handle this. But I'd really like to see the documentation added (at least posted as a patch if not committed), well before the next commitfest, so that Robert and others who want to review the code, have the documentation available.

- Heikki



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