Re: hot standby - merged up to CVS HEAD

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Bruce Momjian<bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> You are right you don't have to justify anything, but neither can you
> claim ownership of the patch/feature and complain that others are
> working on it too.  This is a community project --- if you want your
> patches to remain your property, I suggest you no longer post them to
> our community lists.  If you are actively working on patches, I assume
> others will not duplicate your work, but if you are idle, others are
> encouraged to keep improving the patch.  Again, if you don't like that,
> then perhaps the community-development process isn't for you.

Simon,

I think it would also be fair to point out that you keep saying that
you're going to deliver this patch for 8.5, but you haven't provided
any real timetable as to when you're going to start working on it or
when it'll be completed. Because this patch IS so important to the
community, people want to know the answers to those questions. That
is exactly why you were asked about your schedule at PGcon; and you
demurred. I understand that your #1 priority needs to be the work for
which you get paid the most money, but I think it's unfair to ask
other people to wait for you to work on something when you haven't
committed to a timetable for working on it. It might be unfair to ask
it even if you had committed to a timetable and that timetable was
well out in the future, but it's certainly unfair when there is no
timetable at all.

The most recent discussion of the timing of this patch was that you
opined it should go after Streaming Rep. Based on the review of
Streaming Rep this CommitFest, I would say that there is an awful lot
of work left to be done to make that patch committable. I think we
will be lucky if it makes it into 8.5. Call me a pessimist but I
think we'll be doing pretty well if it makes it into 8.6. I think the
chances that we are going to get streaming rep committed and still
have enough CommitFests left to get Hot Standby committed too are just
about zero, so waiting for Streaming Rep to be committed first does
not seem like a very realistic plan to me. Note that Streaming Rep
got moved to returned with feedback on *the first day* of this
CommitFest; that's how much work it took to see that it was not
committable. Note also that the resistance to committing large
patches is going to grow and grow as we get closer to the end of this
development cycle. I am very much afraid that if we don't have a
version of Hot Standby that is reviewable for the next CommitFest we
are going to be out of luck for 8.5.

I do not think that I have the juice to make Hot Standby happen. It's
possible that I don't know my own strength, but I'm not prepared to
bet on it. At least, it looks like I do have the juice to dust of the
bitrot, and maybe fix some of the more superficial problems with it.
I would like to think that is something helpful.

...Robert