Re: Collation mega-cleanups

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 07:21:16PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 10, 2011 07:08:23 PM Ross J. Reedstrom wrote:
> > On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 03:57:12PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> 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?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > How about "don't commit all the large patches at the end of the cycle"?
> >
> > My take home from following this is: 'Even Tom can get caught in the
> > "just one more little change" trap'
> I don't think any of the changes from Tom deserves that categorization.

No disrespect intended, far from it. The trap is that something at seems
at a distance as relatively small can grow on closer inspection. Which I
think is exactly what Tom said (paraphrased) "The pre-commit review was
insufficent" i.e. the remaining problems seemed little, but were not.

In addition, "little" is relative to who's doing the changes, over what
domain. Things that are little for Tom on PostgreSQL would not be so
for me. Presumably the inverse is true over other domains.

So perhaps it was more of the "This code is less ready than I thought
it was, but now that I've spent the time understanding it and the
problem, the shortest way out is forward". I think we've all been in
that swamp, at one time or another.

Ross
--
Ross Reedstrom, Ph.D. reedstrm(at)rice(dot)edu
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