Drupal + PostgreSQL: review some patches, folks!

baseball bat
am i the girl, the bat or the heart? you decide!

I’ve been working on a site that uses Drupal for a few months now. And I’m living dangerously with CCK, Views and, as of last week, Organic Groups.

I found this sharp moderation module (Modr8) last week, and then quickly realized that I wanted to be able to provide this moderation tool any conferences that wanted it! Enter the Organic Groups.

I’m using PostgreSQL for the back-end database, and so I’m used to being a second-class database citizen in Druplandia. This means that I frequently have to patch modules so that they use SEQUENCE instead of AUTO_INCREMENT, or get rid of the (8) after an INT type. So, when Organic Groups and the og_modr8 modules caused this bug to rear up, and I suddenly had a full-scale “blogs running backwards” problem on my hands, I wasn’t surprised.

Thank goodness for Brenda Wallace’s patch, which fixed everything up a short while later. What got me, however, was that the problem has had a fix (although not Brenda’s ultimate patch) for over a year, but it hasn’t been added to core. Particularly when the problem causes nodes to be presented out of order, site-wide.

Apparently there’s a shortage of PostgreSQL reviewers in the Drupal community.

Fortunately, if you’d like to help get patches applied to core, there’s a page of Patches To Be Reviewed, and a few people are trying to add a postgresql tag to bugs. If you’re a Drupaler and use PostgreSQL, please take a few minutes to review a patch.

5 thoughts on Drupal + PostgreSQL: review some patches, folks!

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  1. Wow, that’s some ugly code Drupal is using there. Rewriting the SQL on the fly using regular expressions in PHP?! I hope they have some sort of abstraction layer planned for the future.

  2. ISTM the real problem here wasn’t a lack of reviewers; that patch had been reviewed a field tested aplenty; but a problem of postgres’ continued treatment as a second class citizens by the drupal commiters, which lead to the problem having to be fixed several times more than necessary

  3. @Mike – yeah, you noticed that too?

    @Robert – I’ve met a few people, including Acquians and Lullabots. Maybe some social pressure on them to step it up? looks like there’s 40 people in the Pg group now. Might be enough to spur some action.

  4. There’s now a full set of regression unit tests for Drupal 7 (in cvs) — and they need to be run before something is commited

    What we need now is folks running these tests against postgresql.

    oh, and you’re welcome for the path 🙂 a bunch of my postgres fixes snuck into the official tarball in this week security release.