Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose

Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 03:18:11PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> * Another reason for things sitting a long time is that they're too
>> big to review without an unreasonable amount of effort. We should
>> encourage authors to break large patches into smaller stepwise
>> refinements. It may seem like that will result in taking forever
>> to reach the end goal, but dropping a huge patchset on the community
>> isn't going to give speedy results either.

> I think it is sometimes hard to incrementally apply patches if the
> long-term goal isn't agreed or know to be achievable.

True. The value of the earlier patches in the series can be unclear
if you don't understand what the end goal is. But I think people
could post a "road map" of how they intend a patch series to go.

Another way of looking at this is that sometimes people do post large
chunks of work in long many-patch sets, but we tend to look at the
whole series as something to review and commit as one (or I do, at
least). We should be more willing to bite off and push the earlier
patches in such a series even when the later ones aren't entirely
done.

(The cfbot tends to discourage this, since as soon as one of the
patches is committed it no longer knows how to apply the rest.
Can we improve on that tooling somehow?)

regards, tom lane