Re: Multi-xacts and our process problem

Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 7:04 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > I think there's nobody, or at least very few people, who are getting
> > paid to find/fix bugs rather than write cool new features. This is
> > problematic. It doesn't help when key committers are overwhelmed by
> > trying to process other peoples' patches. (And no, I'm not sure that
> > "appoint more committers" would improve matters. What we've got is
> > too many barely-good-enough patches. Tweaking the process to let those
> > into the tree faster will not result in better quality.)
>
> I agree, although generally I think committers are responsible for
> fixing what they commit, and I've certainly dropped everything a few
> times to do so. And people who will someday become committers are
> generally the sorts of people who do that, too. Perhaps we've relied
> overmuch on that in some cases - e.g. I really haven't paid much
> attention to the multixact stuff until lately, because I assumed that
> it was Alvaro's problem. And maybe that's not right. But I know that
> when a serious bug is found in something I committed, I expect that if
> anyone else fixes it, that's a bonus.

For the record, I share the responsibility over committed items
principle, and I adhere to it to as full an extent as possible.
Whenever possible I try to enlist the submitter's help for a fix, but if
they do not respond I consider whatever fix to be on me. (I have
dropped everything to get fixes done, on several occasions.)

As for multixacts, since it's what brings up this thread, many of you
realize that the amount of time I have spent fixing issues post-facto is
enormous. If I had a glimpse of the effort that the bugfixing would
cost, I would have certainly dropped it -- spending more time on it
before commit was out of the question. I appreciate the involvement of
others in the fixes that became necessary.

One lesson I have learned from all this is to try to limit the
additional complexity from any individual patch.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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