Re: a raft of parallelism-related bug fixes

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 12:18 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> So, there may be a person who knows how to do all of that
> work and get it done in a reasonable time frame and also knows how to
> make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be as involved in the
> process as they want to be and that there are no bugs or controversial
> design decisions, but I am not that person. I am doing my best.
>
>> To be more specific, I thought it was really hard to test parallel
>> sequential scan a few months ago, because there was so many threads
>> and so many dependencies. I appreciate that we now use git
>> format-patch patch series for complicated stuff these days, but it's
>> important to make it clear how everything fits together. That's
>> actually what I was thinking about when I said we need to be clear on
>> how things fit together from the CF app patch page, because there
>> doesn't seem to be a culture of being particular about that, having
>> good "annotations", etc.
>
> I agree that you had to be pretty deeply involved in that thread to
> follow everything that was going on. But it's not entirely fair to
> say that it was impossible for anyone else to get involved.

All that I wanted to do was look at EXPLAIN ANALYZE output that showed
a parallel seq scan on my laptop, simply because I wanted to see a
cool thing happen. I had to complain about it [1] to get clarification
from you [2].

I accept that this might have been a somewhat isolated incident (that
I couldn't easily get *at least* a little instant gratification), but
it still should be avoided. You've accused me of burying the lead
plenty of times. Don't tell me that it was too hard to prominently
place those details somewhere where I or any other contributor could
reasonably expect to find them, like the CF app page, or a wiki page
that is maintained on an ongoing basis (and linked to at the start of
each thread). If I said that that was too much to you, you'd probably
shout at me. If I persisted, you wouldn't commit my patch, and for me
that probably means it's DOA.

I don't think I'm asking for much here.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAM3SWZSefE4uQk3r_3gwpfDWWtT3P51SceVsL4=g8v_mE2Abtg@mail.gmail.com
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA+TgmoartTF8eptBhiNwxUkfkctsFc7WtZFhGEGQywE8e2vCmg@mail.gmail.com
--
Peter Geoghegan