Re: 8.4 release planning (was Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Automatic view update rules)

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Particularly with regard to hot standby, which by any sane reading was
> not close to being committable on 1 November (a fortiori from the fact
> that it's *still* not committable despite large amounts of later work).

While I haven't follwed every detail of this patch set, I'm not quite sure I
see that as being very fair to Simon.

Simon has put a lot of time into Hot Standby and has followed the
pseudo-defacto community process from design through what he believes to be
near-completion; he can't be sure of completion until someone reviews his
work.

Honestly, I'm not trying to marginalize your effort reviewing other patches,
and I know everyone is busy. Hell, as much as I'd love to have this
feature, I too have been unable to find enough time to review Simon's
stuff. However, over the past few months, I seem to recall seeing Simon
submit countless requests for review and regardless of whether it was
completely ready to go November 1st or not, at this time I don't think
anyone but Simon has a complete view of what his patch(es) even look like.
Yet, albeit with almost no review from the committers, Simon has continually
worked through testing, revising his patches, and requesting information and
suggestions from the community.

Frankly Tom, I don't know of anyone in the community with as much experience
in the recovery code as you and Simon. So, any of the major edge case
problems will probably only be found by you regardless of how many of us
review Simon's work.

I do know that this is a feature which a large number of Postgres users
really want and were counting on being in 8.4. Looking forward, if no one
wanted to review these patches in November, and seemingly no one wants to
review them now, how can we expect this to change for 8.5? Can anyone point
out something Simon did wrong in this process?

--
Jonah H. Harris, Senior DBA
myYearbook.com