Re: Commitfest problems

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 5:55 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> How about *you* run the next one, Tom?
>
> I think the limited amount of time I can put into a commitfest is better
> spent on reviewing patches than on managing the process.

That's not really the point. The point is that managing the last
CommitFest in particular is roughly equivalent to having your arm
boiled in hot oil. A certain percentage of the people whose patches
are obviously not ready to commit complain and moan about how (a)
their patch really is ready for prime-time, despite all appearances to
the contrary, and/or (b) their patch is so important that it deserves
and exception, and/or (c) how you are a real jerk for treating them so
unfairly. This is not fun, which is why I've given up on doing it. I
could not get a single person to support me when I tried to enforce
any scheduling discipline, so my conclusion was that the community did
not care about hitting the schedule; and it took weeks of 24x7 effort
to build a consensus to reject even one large, problematic patch whose
author wasn't willing to admit defeat. If the community is prepared
to invest some trusted individuals with real authority, then we might
be able to remove some of the pain here, but when that was discussed
at a PGCon developer meeting a few years back, it was clear that no
more than 20% of the people in the room were prepared to support that
concept.

At this point, though, I'm not sure how much revisiting that
discussion would help. I think the problem we need to solve here is
that there are just not enough senior people with an adequate amount
of time to review. Whether it's because the patches are more complex
or that there are more of them or that those senior people have become
less available due to other commitments, we still need more senior
people involved to be able to handle the patches we've got in a timely
fashion without unduly compromising stability. And we also need to do
a better job recruiting and retaining mid-level reviewers, both
because that's where senior people eventually come from, and because
it reduces the load on the senior people we've already got.

(I note that the proposal to have the CFM review everything is merely
one way of meeting the need to have senior people spend more time
reviewing. But I assure all of you that I spend as much time
reviewing as I can find time for. If someone wants to pay me the same
salary I'm making now to do nothing but review patches, I'll think
about it. But even then, that would also mean that I wasn't spending
time writing patches of my own.)

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