Re: [9.4 CF 1] The Commitfest Slacker List

JD said:
> Leave your ego at the door. Josh is doing what could be considered one
> of the most thankless (public) jobs in this project. How about we
> support him in getting these patches taken care of instead of whining
> about the fact that he called us out for not doing our jobs (reviewing
> patches) in the first place.

Actually, I think this is a very important thing for us to discuss, in
fact more important than reviewing any individual patch. 9.3 CF4 took
almost **4 months** so it's clear that the system isn't working as
designed. So let's hash this out during CF1 rather than during CF4.

We've had the policy of "submit one, review one" since the 9.2 dev
cycle. However, to my knowledge nobody has actually tried to enforce
this before, or even published stats on it. Once I did that for this
CF, it became readily apparent to me that the failure of this policy is
at least 50% of the problem with finishing commitfests -- and releases
-- on time.

The vast majority of submitters aren't reviewing other people's patches,
even ones who have the time and resources to do so. You'll notice that
most of the people on the List aren't new contributors to PostgreSQL; if
anything, the new contributors have been exemplary in responding to
private email that they need to do some review.

More, on the slacker list are 6-8 people who I happen to know are paid
by their employers to work on PostgreSQL. Those are the folks I'm
particularly targeting with the Slacker list; I want to make it
transparently clear to those folks' bosses that they have to give their
staff time for patch review if they expect to get the features *they*
want into PostgreSQL.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com