Re: Last gasp

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Peter Geoghegan <peter(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 11 April 2012 02:14, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> My perception of what's going on here is dramatically different from
>> yours.  I don't think there was any overflow of submissions for 9.2.
>
> That is just not true. See the attached graph (couldn't produce one
> with better resolution at short notice) - I've just eyeballed the
> graph, but it looks like an upward trend to me.

I don't know what this is a graph of, but if you look at the number of
patches in each of the CommitFests for the last couple of releases,
you see this:

9.0: 66, 40, 38, 60
9.1: 53, 52, 43, 96
9.2: 60, 52, 53, 104

There might be an upward trend there, but it isn't a very steep one.
It also seems pretty clear to me (although you are welcome to
disagree) that even if the *number* of patches in 9.2 was higher than
9.1, the average complexity was less, at least for the first three
CommitFests.

By the way, let's take a look at the major features list for 9.0 and
9.1, as well as who wrote them.

From the 9.0 release notes:

- Streaming Replication (Fujii Masao - not a committer)
- Hot Standby (Simon Riggs - committer - though he wasn't when he
wrote the first version of this patch)
- GRANT/REVOKE IN SCHEMA (Petr Jelinek - not a committer)
- ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES (Petr Jelinek - not a committer)
- DO (Peter Jelinek - not a committer)
- 64-bit Windows (Tsutomu Yamada, Magnus Hagander - not a committer
and a committer, respectively)
- Better window functions (Hitoshi Harada - not a committer)
- ORDER BY for aggregates (Andrew Gierth - not a committer)
- Deferrable unique constraints (Dean Rasheed - not a committer)
- Exclusion constraints (Jeff Davis - not a committer)
- RADIUS (Magnus Hagander - a committer)
- LDAP improvements (Robert Fleming, Magnus Hagander - not a committer
and a committer, respectively)
- Better LISTEN/NOTIFY (Joachim Wieland - not a committer)
- Better VACUUM FULL (Itagaki Takahiro, Tom Lane - both now
committers, but Itagaki Takahiro became one only later)
- pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian - a committer)
- join removal (Robert Haas - now a committer, but not then)
- EXPLAIN enhancements (Robert Haas - now a committer, but not then)
- hstore enhancments (Andrew Gierth - now a committer, but not then)

And for 9.1:

- synchronous replication (Simon Riggs - committer)
- foreign tables (Shigeru Hanada, Robert Haas, Jan Urbanski, Heikki
Linnakangas - two committers and two non-committers)
- per-column collation (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane - both committers)
- extensions (Dimitri Fontaine, Tom Lane - one non-committer, one committer)
- SSI (Kevin Grittner, Dan Ports - not committers)
- unlogged tables (Robert Haas - committer)
- DML WITH (Marko Tiikkaja, Hitoshi Harada - not committers)
- KNN-GIST (Teodor Sigaev, Tom Lane - both committers)
- SECURITY LABEL and sepgsql (KaiGai Kohei - not a committer)
- Update the PL/Python server-side language (Jan Urbanski - not a committer)

We don't have the release notes for 9.2 yet, and I don't want to
speculate too much about exactly what things will get labelled as
major features, but.... we might have shifted slightly in the
direction of major features coming from committers, because I worked
on three things that could arguably be placed in that category and
Tom's query planner stuff might qualify as well. OTOH, Fujii Masao
wrote cascading replication, which I am positive will be listed, and
you did the pg_stat_statements rework, which is certainly awfully
nifty whether it makes the major features cut or not, and Jeff Davis
did range types, which I think may be the most innovative thing in 9.2
even though it doesn't have quite as broad an appeal. However exactly
the list turns out, there is no question that non-committers have been
quite successful in getting significant feature enhancements committed
in each of the last three releases, and I'm pretty confident it goes
back a lot further than that.

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