Re: question regarding policy for patches to out-of-support branches

On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 10:04 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > I added them here with minimal copy editing an no attempt to organize or
> > sort into groups:
> > https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committing_checklist#Policies
> > If someone has thoughts on how to improve I am happy to make more changes.
>
> Thanks! I summoned the energy to make a few more improvements,
> particularly updating stuff that seemed out-of-date. I'm sure
> there's more that could be added here.

This is nice! I wonder if we could interest anyone in creating tooling
that could be used to check some of this stuff -- ideally run as part
of the regular build process, so that you fail to notice that you did
it wrong.

Not all of these rules are subject to automatic verification e.g. it's
hard to enforce that a change to an out-of-support branch makes no
functional change. But an awful lot of them could be, and I would
personally be significantly happier and less stressed if I knew that
'ninja && meson test' was going to tell me that I did it wrong before
I pushed, instead of finding out afterward and then having to drop
everything to go clean it up.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com