Re: Patch committers

Tom Lane wrote:
> While I'm not against promoting more committers to deal with the influx of patches,
> the only way I know for people to get to the skill level of being fully
> competent reviewers is to have done a lot of patch writing themselves.
>
The dynamic going on right now is that many people who might otherwise
be writing their own patches are instead doing patch review to try and
keep the project as a whole moving forward. I actually had two off-list
discussions about that just today, that topic pops up pretty regularly
as I talk with contributors at all levels.

Since most people have an upper limit on how much community time they
can spend, every minute spent reviewing is one you're not working on
your own patches during. The way you're describing the qualification
process, it would be easy to conclude that there's a reviewer ladder,
and a developer ladder, and only climbing the latter leads to being a
committer--that no matter how much review you do, it doesn't really
count as a committer grade skill.

I'm not sure that's the message you want to be sending, because anyone
who dreams of being a committer is going to stay as far away from doing
review as they can if that notion spreads. Based on the growing
frustration with "doing review doesn't leave me with time for my own
patches" I keep hearing, that perception is already something to be wary
of. If the primary criteria is generating patches that apply with
minimal changes, you could make a case that someone who's gotten skilled
enough as a reviewer to only pass through patches of that quality should
get some recognition even if they didn't write them. That's clearly a
useful subset of the skills needed to commit patches only if they look
to be ready for it.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com