Re: SE-PostgreSQL/Lite Review

Robert Haas wrote:
> One comment I have in general about this process is that I think it
> would enormously reduce the level of pain associated with making these
> kinds of changes if we could get patches that were not full of minor
> issues that need to be cleaned up (like comments not properly
> adjusted, spelling/grammar errors, formatting inconsistent with the
> rest of the code base, poor English).
Sure, it's not fair to ask the committers to do that. But it's not
really something we can expect to get in all situations from our English
as a second language contributors either--it's hard enough to get these
details right even on stuff done in this country by native speakers. At
least we've got a big stack of comments that usually make sense if you
read them to work with on the SE-PostgreSQL patches, which is much
better than the alternative.

I think we need a two pronged attack on this issue. Eventually I think
someone who wants this feature in there will need to sponsor someone
(and not even necessarily a coder) to do a sizable round of plain old
wording cleanup on the comment text of the patch. Robert is right to
point out the committers are too expensive, in terms of what work for
the community they could be doing besides that, to waste on that job.
English editing help good enough to help a lot for this purpose isn't
hard to find though. As far as formatting, it drives me a little crazy
that it's not more common practice for contributors to do their own
targeted pgindent runs to at least nail some of the low-hanging fruit in
that area, due the difficulty of working with the tool. That's
something else I think it would be nice to invest a little time in
improving. For example, there's no reason we should still have to kick
back patches regularly just because of tab/space issues, and I know I
run into one of those nearly every CommitFest.

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