Re: Commitfest II CLosed

On 10/21/2013 06:56 AM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> 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."

Yeah, that doesn't work at all. It's been tried. Before I published
the Slacker list, I emailed all of those folks privately (save one, due
to an address typo), and 90% of them didn't even respond. Public shame,
however reprehensible, was a vastly more effective motivator.

Well, it works with *you*. But you were reviewing patches anyway.

The simple problem is that, when it comes down to day-to-day work, our
hackers collectively simply don't prioritize the review process. Years
ago, people waited for Tom, Bruce, and Robert to review everything and
went and did their own stuff. Now people are waiting for the
CFM to organize everything, and go and do their own stuff. Either way,
the majority of our contributors are dumping responsibility on someone
else to see that review and commit happens, and that doesn't scale.

Every single person who contributes to this project needs to take
responsibility for making sure that patches get reviewed and committed,
and worth some inconvenience to keep working. Until we do that, our
review process will continue to be dysfunctional.

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