Re: knngist patch support

I have to say that as a 3rd party observer it is quite obvious to
understand why the PostgreSQL software is so good - people are very
passionate about the work they are doing. However, in this instance,
as a by-stander, it seems that there is a lot of energy being spent on
pointing fingers. At the end, the only people that loose are users
like me who would love to have a feature like this since it would
literally make one of the most common types of spatial queries, for
lack of better wording, ridiculously fast. I sincerely apologize if I
triggered any kind of trouble by asking a questions about this
feature.

- Ragi

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> 2010/2/11 Oleg Bartunov <oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su>:
>> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
>> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
>> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
>> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch. People with
>
> So...  I think the reason why there was no movement between November
> 25th and January 15th is because no CommitFest started between
> November 25th and January 15th.  Had you submitted the patch on
> November 14th, you would have gotten a lot more feedback in November;
> I agree that we don't have a lot of formal documentation about the
> CommitFest process, but I would think that much would be pretty clear,
> but maybe not.  The reason there was no movement after January 15th is
> because (1) I couldn't get anyone to volunteer to review it, except
> Mark Cave-Ayland who didn't actually do so (or anyway didn't post
> anything publicly), and (2) we were still working on rbtree.
>
> Personally, I am a little irritated about the whole way this situation
> has unfolded.  I devoted a substantial amount of time over my
> Christmas vacation to patch review, and many of those patches went on
> to be committed.  Some of the patches I reviewed were yours.  I did
> not get paid one dime for any of that work.  I expressed candidly,
> from the very beginning, that getting such a large patch done by the
> end of this CommitFest would likely be difficult, especially given
> that it had two precursor patches.  In exchange for giving you my
> honest opinions about your patches two weeks before the scheduled
> start of the CommitFest, over my Christmas vacation, and for free, I
> got a long stream of complaints from you and others about how the
> process is unfair, and as nearly zero help making the prerequisite
> patches committable as it is possible for anyone to achieve.  It
> regularly took 4-6 days for a new version of the patch to appear, and
> as often as not questions in my reviews were ignored for days, if not
> weeks.  It took a LOT of iterations before my performance concerns
> were addressed; and I believe that process could have been done MUCH
> more quickly.
>
> Now, it is possible that as you are sitting there reading this email,
> you are thinking to yourself "well, your feedback didn't actually make
> that patch any better, so this whole thing is just pure
> obstructionism."  I don't believe that's the case, but obviously I'm
> biased and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  What I can tell
> you for sure is that all of my reviewing was done with the best of
> motivations and in a sincere attempt to do the right thing.
>
> You may be right that January 15th was a bad time to start a
> CommitFest, although it's very unclear to me why that might be.  At
> least in the US, the holidays are over long before January 15th, but
> we had a very small crop of reviewers this time around, and a number
> of them failed to review the patches they picked up, or did only a
> very cursory review.  It might be mentioned that if you have concerns
> about getting your own patches reviewed, you might want to think about
> reviewing some patches by other people.  Of the 60 patches currently
> in the 2010-01 CommitFest, I'm listed as a reviewer on 12 of them.
> Needless to say, if someone else had volunteered to do some or all of
> the review work on some of those patches, I would have had more time
> to work on other patches.
>
> ...Robert
>