Re: CF3+4 (was Re: Parallel query execution)

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Dimitri Fontaine
<dimitri(at)2ndquadrant(dot)fr> wrote:
> Advice: You don't do things that way, this way is the only one we
> will ever accept, because we've been sweating blood over
> the years to get in a position where it now works.
>
> Hint: it's not talking about the patch content, but what is
> supposedly a problem with the patch. It's easy to answer
> "I'm so happy I didn't actually do it that way".
>
> Judgement: You need to think about the problem you want to solve
> before sending a patch, because there's a hole in it too
> big for me to be able to count how many bugs are going to
> to dance in there. It's not a patch, it's a quagmire. BTW,
> I didn't read it, it stinks too much.
>
> Hint: imagine it was your patch and now you have to try and
> convince any other commiter to have a look at it.

I'm not going to pretend that all review comments are constructive,
but I also think that to some degree the difference between these two
things depends on your perspective. I recall, in particular, the
email that prompted the famous "in short: -1 from me regards tom lane"
T-shirt, which I believe to be this one:

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/28927.1236820868@sss.pgh.pa.us

That's not a positive review, but when it comes down to it, it's a
pretty factual email. IMHO, anyway, and YMMV.

My own experience is different from yours, I guess. I actually like
it when I post a patch, or suggest a concept, and Tom fires back with
a laundry list of reasons it won't work. It often induces me to step
back and approach the same problem from a different and better angle,
and the result is often better for it. What I don't like is when I
(or anyone) posts a patch and somebody says something that boils down
to "no one wants that". *That* ticks me off. Because you know what?
At a minimum, *I* want that. If I didn't, I wouldn't have written a
patch. And usually, the customers I support want that, too. Now,
somebody else may not want it, and that is fine. But IMHO, posting a
patch should be considered prima facie evidence of non-zero demand for
the associated feature.

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