Re: next CommitFest

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> What about people who contribute hours and hours of their time in
>> other ways? Are they required to contribute even more of their time to
>> review as well, just to help their own occasional code contributions
>> get through the process?
>
> Yes, but the rule needs to be hard for a few reasons. If your employer
> encourages you to write a patch then they need to be made aware that you
> must also do all the other things too: write docs, supply tests, explain
> it *and* include review time. Since reviewing your own patch isn't
> possible, we must require patch review of other's patches. The rule is
> deliberately hard on the contributor to ensure the sponsor understands
> the rule and allows more time.

Which is fine for sponsored patches, but my employer doesn't sponsor
me to hack on PostgreSQL directly - we have other staff that are far
more capable of doing that :-). My annual submissions are for my own
personal development/enjoyment/whatever, and are never chosen for my
employer, but because they seem interesting, are common requests from
users, or would help pgAdmin provide improved functionality for users.

The bottom line is, if I'm required to review patches, it will impact
on other community work, which I am almost certainly more qualified to
do and would be more productive at.

That said - in general I don't disagree with the idea of everyone
chipping in, and I do try to do so myself on appropriate patches (for
example, the recent Windows DACL bug fix which I spent a few hours
reviewing and testing - and am still waiting for Magnus to commit
:-p). I just think that *requiring* people to review will ultimately
be counter productive.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com