On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 10:37:56PM +0200, Michal ??iha?? wrote:
Sorry for long mail, but I thing we should somehow face to future. Silence in mailing lists and CVS doesn't indicate anything good.
It's not a positive sign, but it's not entirely negative either - there have been periods of quiet in the past, just because everybody is busy.
I myself hardly find time to do some work on phpMyAdmin when there are other project which attract me more and there is not only coding I want to do. Partly it is caused by me needs - I no longer require new features from phpMyAdmin for daily work, partly by lack of motivation for digging into quite complex parts of code.
I think there is another side to this, that you are perhaps overlooking: Compared to existing functionality, how much do you actually NEED views and stored procedures? There are a great many proponents against stored procedures, claiming that business logic doesn't belong in the database (I agree with them, but only because stored procs make maintenance harder than it should be, you can't keep multiple versions).
Likewise, if your application is complex enough to actually require views, there are probably other parts of it beyond PMA.
It looks like all current team members are quite busy with other stuff or don't have motivation to work on phpMyAdmin. We're way behind current MySQL features by not supporting views and stored procedures, which even can not be entered as SQL as changing delimiter completely chokes our SQL parser/spliter.
As for changing the delimiter - I have tried to look into the mysqli interface for it, but I haven't found anything that seems to be correct for it.
We probably need fresh blood for team, but I don't see anybody who could be interested for this. Anyway fresh blood doesn't mean long time active developer. Our latest acquisition (Sebastian) was very active in first six months (or so, I don't recall exact numbers) and then he seems to run into same problems as all others. This seems to tell me there is something wrong with project. Is it it's code base? Are team members not enough supportive? Probably partly both, but I can't tell real reason.
Our original objectives do stifle some further innovation I agree, but the innovation is at odds with our objectives. It would be nice to have an AJAX based PMA, but that wouldn't work on old browsers.
There is need to move further, in current state we lack many needed features, which are requested. We won't loose our position in MySQL administration in near future as there is not much competence right
[snip]. As I said, it's a matter of demand for new features - none of us as developers have a real need for them, so while that continues, we are unlikely to develop support for them. In the past, I wrote the initial PHPDBG support, the initial query parsing, the Mimer SQL validator support, because I needed them.
Sorry I can't propose where to go. Maybe we should take part on SoC [3] with some larger stuff (eg. stored procedure functions), but it's too late for it right now.
From being involved with other projects that have partipated in SoC before, there has been one very specific complaint - after the SoC was over, they never heard from the students again in many cases - and this lead to bitrot, because nobody on the existing project could/wanted to maintain the student's code.
In terms of future stuff, I may be revisiting the SQL parser code soon, with an eye towards interoperability, because I've been using PostGreSQL at my job, and phpPgAdmin forked from us a long time ago, and as such, doesn't have some things that we do, while instead taking different paths to some functionality - they don't have an SQL parser, but they do have some support for stored procedures and views.