Re: Last gasp

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> I think this basically just boils down to too many patches and not
>> enough people.  I was interested in Command Triggers from the
>> beginning of this CommitFest, and I would have liked to pick it up
>> sooner, but there were a LOT of patches to work on for this
>> CommitFest.  The first three CommitFests of this cycle each had
>> between 52 and 60 patches, while this one had 106 which included
>> several very complex and invasive patches, command triggers among
>> them.  So there was just a lot more to do, and a number of the people
>> who submitted all of those patches didn't do a whole lot to help
>> review them, sometimes because they were still furiously rewriting
>> their submissions.  It's not surprising that more patches + fewer
>> reviewers = each patch getting less attention, or getting it later.
>
> This is a good point. The current process lacks inherent scalability.
>
> I would really like us to enforce a policy of 1 patch => 1 review.
> That way we automatically have enough review time, no matter how many
> patches we get. If we don't enforce that, then patch sponsors are more
> likely to take the attitude that review isn't something they need to
> pay for, just the dev work.

I would be generally in favor of that policy, but I would relax it for
people who have only ever submitted a handful of patches, so as to
continue encouraging them to become involved in the community.

It's also worth noting that not all reviews are created equal. It
takes a lot more time to review command triggers than it does to
review pg_archivecleanup extension-skipping. It's not important that
the review effort is *exactly* proportional to the size of what has
been submitted, but it *is* important that when we're having a
CommitFest, people are spending the majority of their time on
reviewing, rather than continuing to spend it developing patches that
aren't done yet. It's perfectly right to say that people should be
given a chance to finish up patches that are almost there, but our
definition of "almost there" has a tendency to expand to the point
where it's laughable when the last CommitFest of the cycle rolls
along.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company