Re: Assisting developers

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> The issue as I see it is not reviewing patches, but defining features.
> Someone sets out to develop "nested transactions", and three days after
> feature freeze we have the first large discussion about what nested
> transactions really are, what they are good for, and how they should
> work.

Bear in mind though that what we have here is a huge discussion about
something that represents much less than 1% of the work involved in the
feature. The hard part of nested transactions (or savepoints or
whatever you care to call 'em) is the implementation support for
reverting the backend's state to an earlier point without going all the
way back to ground-zero-idle state. Alvaro's naturally spent most of
his time on the implementation, because without that there is no point
in debating syntax. And it was the state of the implementation, not the
API which was understood to be unfinished, that drove the decision about
whether this was ready to be included in 7.5.

If we end up backing this out of 7.5, it will be because the remaining
implementation work doesn't get done, not because we are unable to agree
on a syntax. (In which connection I'm a bit disturbed that Alvaro seems
to be spending time arguing with people rather than continuing to work
on internals...)

regards, tom lane