Re: Commitfest II CLosed

On 21.10.2013 16:15, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 10/21/13 1:31 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
>> The point of the CF is exactly that all
>> patches get at least one good round of review. Moving unreviewed patches
>> to the next CF will let them just suffer the same fate there.

Agreed. People have different views on what the purpose of a commitfest
is, but IMO the point is to make sure that every patch submitted gets at
least a cursory review in a timely fashion. Pushing patches to the next
one because no-one has gotten around to review them is a failure.

> What is the alternative?

If no-one really cares enough about a patch to review it, mark it as
"rejected, because no-one but the patch author cares". Harsh, but that's
effectively what pushing to the next commitfest means anyway. Better to
be honest about it. At least that way the author can promote the patch's
virtues more on the mailing list, or personally contact someone who
might be interested, to get some attention, and resubmit if he thinks
that it might have a chance on the next commitfest.

Another alternative is to push harder to make sure that every patch gets
some review. I don't know how to accomplish that. Robert Haas did a
great job at that in the first few commitfests (IIRC), but only because
he personally spent a lot of time not only managing the commitfest but
actually reviewing the patches that no-one else bothered with. That's a
great way to make sure that every patch gets some attention, but I don't
think we have any takers for that role.

I feel guilty to complain, while not actually volunteering to be a
commitfest manager myself, but I wish the commitfest manager would be
more aggressive in nagging, pinging and threatening people to review
stuff. If nothing else, always feel free to nag me :-). Josh tried that
with the infamous Slacker List, but that backfired. Rather than posting
a public list of shame, I think it would work better to send short
off-list nag emails, or chat via IM. Something like "Hey, you've signed
up to review this. Any progress?". Or "Hey, could you take a look at X
please? No-one else seems to care about it."

- Heikki