Re: a raft of parallelism-related bug fixes

On 2016-02-08 15:18:13 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> I agree that you had to be pretty deeply involved in that thread to
> follow everything that was going on. But it's not entirely fair to
> say that it was impossible for anyone else to get involved. Both
> Amit and I, mostly Amit, posted directions at various times saying:
> here is the sequence of patches that you currently need to apply as of
> this time. There was not a heck of a lot of evidence that anyone was
> doing that, though, though I think a few people did, and towards the
> end things changed very quickly as I committed patches in the series.
> We certainly knew what each other were doing and not because of some
> hidden off-list collaboration that we kept secret from the community -
> we do talk every week, but almost all of our correspondence on those
> patches was on-list.

I think having a public git tree, that contains the current state, is
greatly helpful for that. Just announce that you're going to screw
wildly with history, and that you're not going to be terribly careful
about commit messages. That means observers can just do a fetch and a
reset --hard to see the absolutely latest and greatest. By all means
post a series to the list every now and then, but I think for minor
changes it's perfectly sane to say 'pull to see the fixups for the
issues you noticed'.

> I think it's an inherent peril of complicated patch sets that people
> who are not intimately involved in what is going on will have trouble
> following just because it takes a lot of work.

True. But it becomes doubly hard if there's no up-to-date high level
design overview somewhere outside $sizeable_brain. I know it sucks to
write these, believe me. Especially because one definitely feels that
nobody is reading those.

Greetings,

Andres Freund