Postgres development model (was Re: CVS comment)

On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 12:38:10PM +0200, Gaetano Mendola wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> >Subversion and arch have been mentioned, but so far there is no
> >compelling reason to change. It'd take convincing at least a couple
> >of core hackers to get the ball rolling ...
>
> Well, I think having seen what's happening at the 8.0 relase I think
> that committers are too overloaded and someone else have to be
> "promoted" to be a committers, and I believe that having betters tools
> can improve the process too.

I don't think it was a problem of committers. To me it was a problem of
reviewers. Those are very scarce (for the bigger items it's mostly only
Tom). Maybe a better SCM could help with this, but I doubt it. As an
example, I did read the autovacuum patch, but I had no useful comment to
make on it. Why didn't Jan or Bruce say something about it? What about
Neil or Joe Conway? If any of them could have had useful feedback, they
didn't have the time to do it.

The Linux model, heavily changed by the BitKeeper phenomenom (and I
think Andrew Morton plays a big role there too), does not really apply
here because the difference in manpower is huge. They currently have a
very succesful model, very different from what was two years ago, but
they do have several very capable mantainers/reviewers.

Maybe our development process does need a revision. Neil Conway seemed
to agree some time ago, but the rest of the people doesn't seem to have
an opinion on the subject that I remember.

But it's not a problem of committers. Oleg Bartunov is a committer too,
as is Dennis Bjorklund, Peter Eisentraut, Marc Fournier and others. But
apparently these are issues that they are not able to help with.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Some men are heterosexual, and some are bisexual, and some
men don't think about sex at all... they become lawyers" (Woody Allen)