Split up the wiki TODO page?

Tom Lane wrote:

So, if you edit the current version of the TODO page, you get this stern
warning:

WARNING: This page is 106 kilobytes long; some browsers may have
problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider
breaking the page into smaller sections.

Hmm ... my browser isn't failing, but I do seem to detect a certain lack
of snappiness to the edits. But what's more worrisome is that the page
size was 85k less than a week ago. Whatever the practical limits might
be, we are going to blow past them PDQ with that sort of bloat rate.

I think the wiki TODO needs to be broken into multiple pages. How can
we go about that?

I would think the easiest thing to do would be to break up the page into
categories. Either via difficulty or type of fix (administrative,
planner, etc...)

Joshua D. Drake

Joshua D. Drake napsal(a):

Tom Lane wrote:

<snip>

I think the wiki TODO needs to be broken into multiple pages. How can
we go about that?

I would think the easiest thing to do would be to break up the page into
categories. Either via difficulty or type of fix (administrative,
planner, etc...)

+1 to split it by current chapters (administrative, planner ...).

Zdenek

--
Zdenek Kotala Sun Microsystems
Prague, Czech Republic http://sun.com/postgresql

Zdenek Kotala napsal(a):

Joshua D. Drake napsal(a):

Tom Lane wrote:

<snip>

I think the wiki TODO needs to be broken into multiple pages. How can
we go about that?

I would think the easiest thing to do would be to break up the page
into categories. Either via difficulty or type of fix (administrative,
planner, etc...)

+1 to split it by current chapters (administrative, planner ...).

And maybe add special TODO page called testing for tracking ideas how to improve
regress tests, buildfarm and so on.

Zdenek

--
Zdenek Kotala Sun Microsystems
Prague, Czech Republic http://sun.com/postgresql

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Tom Lane wrote:

WARNING: This page is 106 kilobytes long; some browsers may have
problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb.

Hmm ... my browser isn't failing, but I do seem to detect a certain lack
of snappiness to the edits.

There haven't been any popular browsers with the 32kb limit around since
circa 2002. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_size#Web_browsers_which_have_problems_with_long_articles
for details. The practical limit for any recent browser is 400KB, almost
4X as large as the article is now. For comparison, the longest page on
Wikipedia proper is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_British_throne at
362kb.

There's certainly been a recent flurry of activity as this page has been
tweaked to meet pent up demand for an easy to edit TODO list, I have my
doubts the real limit here will be hit anytime soon.

The usual way to handle editing larger documents like this one with better
responsiveness is to edit section at a time, using the [edit] buttons on
the right of each section rather than the one at the top. If you're not
doing that already that might help you out.

Not arguing against breaking it into sections (don't really care either
way), just pointing out that it may not actually be necessary.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Tom Lane wrote:

WARNING: This page is 106 kilobytes long; some browsers may have
problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb.

Hmm ... my browser isn't failing, but I do seem to detect a certain lack
of snappiness to the edits.

The practical limit for any recent browser is 400KB, almost
4X as large as the article is now.

Okay...

There's certainly been a recent flurry of activity as this page has been
tweaked to meet pent up demand for an easy to edit TODO list,

Certainly true. Okay, let's leave it alone for a little while and see
if the growth curve flattens out. It'll certainly be easiest to manage
if it can stay a single page.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane escribi�:

Certainly true. Okay, let's leave it alone for a little while and see
if the growth curve flattens out. It'll certainly be easiest to manage
if it can stay a single page.

FWIW most of the growth occured when I changed the archive links to
include the message subject.

In any case, we already have some TODO items split -- for example the
XML_Todo file, Todo:Collate (these need to be renamed), etc. I'm not
sure if it's best to merge them back into Todo, or to separate the few
items in Todo into those other files and add a direct reference to them.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:48 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Certainly true. Okay, let's leave it alone for a little while and see
if the growth curve flattens out. It'll certainly be easiest to manage
if it can stay a single page.

Apart from the management aspect (which is very much a valid concern),
others have expressed a desire to be able to easily search the list
for "easy" Todo items. We got that working by adding the [E] tags to
those items, and it's now very convenient to search for them.

If we split the page up into subpages for each section, that feature
would be sunk.

The size of the page really isn't something we should be worrying
about. As Greg points out, we have the usual wiki per-section edit
capability, so in practice we will almost never need to edit the whole
page at once. The only reasons for doing so are to perform global
changes, or alter the intro text. All day-to-day maintenance of the
list, such as adding new items, marking items as "done", etc. should
be done via the per-section [edit] links.

Cheers,
BJ

"Brendan Jurd" <direvus@gmail.com> writes:

The size of the page really isn't something we should be worrying
about. As Greg points out, we have the usual wiki per-section edit
capability, so in practice we will almost never need to edit the whole
page at once. The only reasons for doing so are to perform global
changes, or alter the intro text. All day-to-day maintenance of the
list, such as adding new items, marking items as "done", etc. should
be done via the per-section [edit] links.

Hm, I'd never noticed those --- have they been there long?

Maybe the above policy should be stated somewhere at the top of the
page?

regards, tom lane

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 3:31 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

"Brendan Jurd" <direvus@gmail.com> writes:

The size of the page really isn't something we should be worrying
about. As Greg points out, we have the usual wiki per-section edit
capability, so in practice we will almost never need to edit the whole
page at once. The only reasons for doing so are to perform global
changes, or alter the intro text. All day-to-day maintenance of the
list, such as adding new items, marking items as "done", etc. should
be done via the per-section [edit] links.

Hm, I'd never noticed those --- have they been there long?

It's a standard mediawiki feature. We had some challenges getting
them to cooperate with our nicely indented subsections, but they've
certainly been there.

Maybe the above policy should be stated somewhere at the top of the
page?

Yeah. I'm starting to think we could do with adding a Help page for
the Todo, analogous to
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CommitFest:Help. The Help page would
explain how to take care of the various administrative tasks. I'd
rather not clutter up the actual Todo page with that sort of thing; it
gets in the way of the people who are just looking to view the list.

I'll go write it up now.

Cheers,
BJ

All,

Apart from the management aspect (which is very much a valid concern),
others have expressed a desire to be able to easily search the list
for "easy" Todo items. We got that working by adding the [E] tags to
those items, and it's now very convenient to search for them.

Goodness, if only we had some kind of organized repository for these
TODO items capable of holding multiple categories per item. Maybe
something with items and attributes, and some kind of "relationship"
between the TODO item and its categories.

I don't know where we'd find something like that, though. Maybe we
should see if the folks at Ingres have anything. ;-/

--Josh

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 4:23 AM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:

Goodness, if only we had some kind of organized repository for these TODO
items capable of holding multiple categories per item. Maybe something with
items and attributes, and some kind of "relationship" between the TODO item
and its categories.

I don't know where we'd find something like that, though. Maybe we should
see if the folks at Ingres have anything. ;-/

I think I may have heard of such a beast. I believe they call it an
"infostation", or something.

Anyway ...

I've written up a quick explanation of how to administer the todo list:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Talk:Todo

I just planted it on the Talk page for the Todo, rather than creating
a separate page for it.

Cheers,
BJ