Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:
> Now, the other aspect to this whole discussion is that people often
> have code they have developed for academic purposes or for their own
> use which they want to offer to the community "FWIW", and I think we
> sometimes miss an opportunity to take advantage of someone else's
> work because of an assumption that they have some vested interest in
> it's acceptance.  The fact that someone doesn't care enough to try to
> work with the community to get their patch accepted doesn't *always*
> mean that we're better off for ignoring that patch.  Maybe that's
> true 90% of the time or better, but it seems to me that sometimes our
> community is a bit provincial.

We are.

On the other hand, cleaning up other people's not-ready-for-prime-time
patches isn't free. If I spend 4 hours cleaning up a patch in
preparation for a commit, then that's 4 hours I don't get to spend on
my own work. And since I *already* spend 3 or 4 times as much energy
on other people's work as I do on my own, I'm not willing to go much
further in that direction; if anything, I think I'd like to roll it
back a bit. On the other hand, I am emphatically in favor of other
people who are not me being willing to do that kind of work; I think
it benefits our whole community, much as the work of people who write
their own patches or review or volunteer in any other way benefits our
whole community.

Because I commit approximately 10 patches per CommitFest, and review
perhaps another 5-10 that I don't end up committing (either because
they get rejected or because someone else commits them), the amount of
time that I can afford to spend on each of those patches is limited.
Generally, if I can't commit a normal-size patch in half an hour of
looking at it, I send back a review and move on. For some patches
that I particularly care about, I have on occasion invested as much as
2-3 days (most recently, a big chunk of my Christmas vacation) to get
them beaten into shape for a commit. I'd be happy to devote more time
per patch, but it ain't gonna happen as long as the number that I have
to handle to get the CommitFest finished on time remains in the
two-digit range.

That having been said, the kind of fixing up that you're talking about
*does* happen, when someone cares enough to make it happen. We have
numerous examples in the archives where person A submits a patch, and
person B reviews it and, in lieu of a review, posts an updated patch,
sometimes when person A has meanwhile totally disappeared, or when
they haven't completely disappeared but don't have time to work on it.
This is actually quite commonplace; it just doesn't happen for every
patch. It tends to happen only for the things someone is really
excited about because, well, fixing up someone else's bad code is not
one of life's great pleasures. It'd be nice if we had even more of it
than we do, but this is an all-volunteer organization.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company