Re: Closing out CommitFest 2009-11

CommitFest 2009-11 is now closed, having committed 27 patches in 33
days. For comparison sake, 2009-09 committed 20 patches in 29 days,
2009-07 37 patches in 34 days, and 2008-09 29 patches in 30 days. The
much bigger 2008-11 involved 58 patches going on for months, the bulk of
it committed 28 patches in 36 days.

Seems pretty consistent at this point: at the average patch
contribution size seen over the last year, about one of those gets
committed per day once we enter a CommitFest. I didn't bother
accounting for things that were committed outside of the official dates,
so it's actually a bit worse than that, but that gives a rough idea
that's easy to remember.

Also, just based on the last three CFs, 42% of patches are either
returned with feedback or rejected (with quite a bit more CF to CF
variation). The working estimation figure I'd suggest is that once a CF
reaches 50 incoming patches it's unlikely that will finish in a month.

CommitFest 2010-01, the last one for 8.5, begins on January 15th, 2010.
I'll be out of commission with projects by then, so unless Robert wants
to reprise his role as CF manager we may need to get someone else
involved to do it. Between the CF application and how proactive
everyone involved is at this point (almost all authors, reviewers, and
committers do the bulk of the state changes and link to messages in the
archives for you), the job of running things does keep getting easier.
And the guidlines for how to be the CF manager are pretty nailed down
now--you could just execute on a pretty mechanical plan and expect to
make useful progress. It's still a lot of time though. I've never had
an appreciation for exactly how many messages flow through this list
like I do now, after a month of needing to read and pay attention to
every single one of them.

For those of you still furiously working on a patch with that deadline,
if you have a large patch and it's not already been reviewed in a
previous CommitFest, I wouldn't give you good odds of it being even
looked at during that one. There doesn't seem to be any official
warning of this where people will likely notice it, but this topic has
been discussed on the list here. Large patches submitted just before
the deadline for a release have not fared very well historically.
Recognizing that, there's really no tolerance for chasing after them (at
the expense of postponing the beta) left for this release. Just figured
I'd pass along that warning before somebody discovers it the hard way,
by working madly to finish their submission up only to see it get kicked
to the next version anyway.

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