Re: Clarifying Commitfest policies

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 2:05 PM Matthias van de Meent
<boekewurm+postgres(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Aug 2022 at 20:04, Jacob Champion <jchampion(at)timescale(dot)com> wrote:
> > Is that enough, or should we do more?
>
> "The CF Checklist" seems to refer to only the page that is (or seems
> to be) intended for the CFM only. We should probably also update the
> pages of "Commitfest", "Submitting a patch", "Reviewing a Patch", "So,
> you want to be a developer?", and the "Developer FAQ" page, which
> doesn't have to be more than removing outdated information and
> refering to any (new) documentation on how to participate in the
> PostgreSQL development and/or Commitfest workflow as a non-CFM.

Agreed, a sweep of those materials would be helpful as well. I'm
personally focused on CFM tasks, since it's fresh in my brain and
documentation is almost non-existent for it, but if you have ideas for
those areas, I definitely don't want to shut down that line of the
conversation.

> Additionally, we might want to add extra text to the "developers"
> section of the main website [0] to refer to any new documentation.
> This suggestion does depend on whether the new documentation has a
> high value for potential community members.

Right. So what kinds of info do we want to highlight in this
documentation, to make it high-quality?

Drawing from some of the questions I've seen recently, we could talk about
- CF "power" structure (perhaps simply to highlight that the CFM has
no additional authority to get patches in)
- the back-and-forth process on the mailing list, maybe including
expected response times
- what to do when a patch is returned (or rejected)

> As an example, the GitHub mirror of the main PostgreSQL repository
> receives a decent amount of pull request traffic. When a project has a
> CONTRIBUTING.md -file at the top level people writing the pull request
> message will be pointed to those contributing guidelines. This could

(I think some text got cut here.)

The mirror bot will point you to the "So, you want to be a developer?"
wiki when you open a PR, but I agree that a CONTRIBUTING doc would
help prevent that small embarrassment.

--Jacob