Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

Robert, Tom,

> Hm ... there are people out there who think *I* get high off rejecting
> patches. I have a t-shirt to prove it. But I seem to be pretty
> ineffective at it too, judging from these numbers.

It's a question of how we reject patches, especially first-time patches. We can reject them in a way which makes the submitter more likely to fix them and/or work on something else, or we can reject them in a way which discourages people from submitting to PostgreSQL at all.

For example, the emails to Radoslaw mentioned nothing about pg_ident, documented spacing requirements, accidental inclusion of files he didn't mean to touch, etc. Instead, a couple of people told him he should abandon his chosen development IDE in favor of emacs or vim. Radoslaw happens to be thick-skinned and persistent, but other first-time submitters would have given up at that point and run off to a more welcoming project.

Mind, even better would be to get our "so you're submitting a patch" documentation and tools into shape; that way, all we need to do is send the first-time submitter a link. Will work on that between testing ...

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