Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Dan Ports <drkp(at)csail(dot)mit(dot)edu> writes:
>> ... But I am aware of other cases in which people in the academic community
>> have done work that could well be of interest to the Postgres community
>> but didn't submit their work here. In part, that was because they did
>> not have the time/motivation to get the work into a polished,
>> acceptable state, and in part because of the reputation of the
>> community.
>
> Well, if the author isn't interested in getting the work into a
> committable state, it's not clear what's the point of submitting it.
> It's not like people who are eager to do that kind of work on someone
> else's patch are thick on the ground.
>
> But I think the perception that we reject most patches is misplaced.
> It's fairly easy to demonstrate that the default assumption around here
> is that submitted patches will get committed.  Looking at the past five
> commitfests (covering a bit more than a year), we committed 201 out of
> 305 patches, and only 10 were actually marked "rejected".  I'm too lazy
> to try to determine just which of the 94 returned-with-feedback patches
> got committed in later fests, but a quick scan suggests at least 20 did,
> and there are more that might get committed in the next fest.  That puts
> the overall patch acceptance rate at perhaps 75%.

That someone overstates the acceptance rate, because it ignores the
patches that people post and immediately get flamed to a well-done
crisp before adding them to the CF app, but there are not very many of
those any more. (If someone thinks I'm wrong about this, they are
cheerfully invited to provide the evidence. It is certainly possible
that I'm guilty of selective memory; this is just how I remember it.)

> At least since the CF
> mechanism was instituted, it seems to me that the dynamic has been that
> someone who doesn't like a patch has to show cause why it shouldn't get
> committed, not the other way around. Robert's recent comment that he
> was afraid he'd have to spend time digging into the mmap patch to prove
> it was broken reflects exactly that feeling.

Yes, and I think it's also telling that the response to that was not
"oh, gee, if Robert thinks this patch is totally busted, we'd better
take that concern seriously" but rather "stop picking on the guy who
submitted the patch". Maybe someone out there is under the impression
that I get high off of rejecting patches; but the statistics you cite
from the CF app don't exactly support the contention that I'm going
around looking for reasons to reject things, or if I am, I'm doing a
pretty terrible job finding them.

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