Re: Last gasp

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Peter Geoghegan <peter(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 10 April 2012 15:26, Kevin Grittner <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:
>> A patch on which the author is continuing to work even in the absence of review
>> should be considered a WIP "want feedback" submission; it should not
>> be allowed to constitute a "placeholder" for inclusion in the
>> release.
>
> To be fair, I doubt that anyone actually believes that. If they did,
> they wouldn't have to pay attention very long to receive a rude
> awakening.

Uhm, this has been done, repeatedly. It is not an imaginary problem.
I've observed people doing the following anti-social things:

1. Adding patches to the CommitFest after the deadline, sometimes
weeks after. The system doesn't prohibit this because there can be
legitimate reasons for doing it, such as when a patch submitted on
time gets a minor piece of it split out into a separate entry.

2. Adding "fake" CommitFest" entries that point to a non-existing
email, and then editing them later to point to the real patch.

3. Posting a patch in time for the CommitFest deadline that is not
even code-complete and then continuing to hack on it vigorously
throughout the CommitFest. Or, a variant: it's code completed, but
not debugged. Both command triggers and foreign key locks fell into
this category, AFAICT.

When these things are pointed out to the people who are doing them,
the response is often either (a) this feature is so important we're
all going to die if it's not in the release how can you even think
about bouncing it or (b) I'm not really still hacking on it these are
all just minor changes. It's surprisingly easy to hoodwink even
experienced contributors into thinking that your patch is really,
really almost done, honest, it just needs a couple more tweaks when in
fact it's nowhere close. I try not to attribute to bad faith what can
be explained by incurable optimism, so maybe we just have a lot of
incurable optimism. But it's doing nobody any good.

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