Re: Collation mega-cleanups

On mån, 2011-05-09 at 14:58 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Tom this collation stuff has seen more post-feature-commit cleanups
> than I think any patch I remember. Is there anything we can learn
> from this?

Don't do big patches?

Seriously, it looks pretty bad, but this is one of the biggest feature
patches in the last 5 years, it touches many places all over the system,
and there is a reason why this topic has been on the TODO list for 10
years: it's overwhelming. I had aimed for a 75% solution: have
something that supports useful cases, that doesn't break anything if you
don't use it, and that can be expanded later. Now maybe I only reached
70%, and maybe the baseline should have been 80%, but what we now have
is more like 107% and includes a handful of features I had explicitly
excluded from the first round.

The patch has been around for 10 months, it has been in every commit
fest, it has tests and documentation, it has been reviewed a bunch of
times, people evidently read (some of) the code, they gave feedback,
adjustments have been made (some reverted during later cleanup, go
figure), performance was questioned, performance tests were done,
adjustments were made, people told me to commit it, so I did, if people
had told me to revert it, I would have reverted it. What can we learn
from that? The bigger your patch, the lonelier you are.