Re: Last gasp

On 04/09/2012 11:12 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:

> It seems as though we need to have a "bad guy" that will say, "that
> sure isn't ready to COMMIT, so we'd better step back from imagining
> that it ought to be completed as part of this COMMITfest."

There's no reward for anyone in the PostgreSQL community to be a bad
guy. If you're too aggressive about it, submitters get mad; too loose,
and you get both committers and people worried about the release
schedule mad. And the community is tight enough that the person you
tick off today might be someone you have to work with next week.

Having sat in this particular seat several times now, I'd say the role
needed here is more mediator than pointy-haired boss. When I write bad
news e-mail to submitters, I try to make the tone more about clarifying
what was learned and what is needed to improve things for a next round
of submissions. It's not easy to adopt a writing tone for that sort of
message while not coming off as insulting to someone.

Getting a feature punted forward is easier to take if a submitter leaves
with a better roadmap and idea what standards they have to meet. On
bigger features in particular, that sometimes requires feedback from a
committer earlier in the process, even if they haven't reached "Ready
for Committer" via a reviewer yet. My comment upthread about nailing
down the committer for big features earlier than smaller ones was along
these same lines.

> I wonder if we're starting to have enough data to establish meaningful
> statistics on feedback.

I had Robert send me a dump of the data that's in the CF app the other
day. I'm hoping to do some useful data mining on it before PGCon.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com