The big picture for patch submission (was Re: MMAP Buffers)

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> ... But please, everyone feel free to continue bashing me for
> wanting a readable patch with some understandable submission notes.

What he said. All this obsessing over whether the mmap patch could or
should have been run through pgindent is missing the big picture.
Namely, that no design documentation or theory-of-operation was offered,
and people are trying to extract that information from the code, and
it's just too messy for that to be feasible. (The patch isn't really
short of comments, but half of the comments seem to be TODOs or author's
questions to himself about whether something will work, and so they just
aren't particularly helpful to someone trying to understand what the
patch does or whether it will work.)

I think that rather than complaining about formatting, we should be
complaining about not following the overall patch submission process
and not providing adequate documentation. Most of the questions that
people are asking right now could have been answered on the strength of
a design sketch, before any code had been written at all. For a patch
as complicated and invasive as this, there should be a design sketch,
which perhaps gets fleshed out into a README file in the final patch.

The Submitting_a_Patch wiki page does touch on the point of getting some
early design feedback before you even try to write a patch, but I think
it could do with more emphasis on the issue.

regards, tom lane