Re: next CommitFest

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 5:04 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 20:52 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
>
>> I would personally prefer not to be involved in the management of the
>> next CommitFest.  Having done all of the July CommitFest and a good
>> chunk of the September CommitFest, I am feeling a bit burned out.
>
> You did a grand job and everybody appreciates it.

Thanks.

>> I feel like Simon Riggs and
>> Fujii Masao really pulled out all the stops to get these ready in time
>> for the September CommitFest, and while I'm not in a hurry to break
>> the world, I think the sooner these can hit the tree, the better of
>> we'll be in terms of releasing 8.5.
>
> Sprinting is hard and we all need to rest afterwards.
>
> How about we just slow the pace down a little? Nobody wants you to quit,
> we just need to set a sustainable pace.

I'm not sure exactly what point you're aiming at here, so I'll respond
with a few thoughts that may or may not pertain.

I think it would be really, really good if we could make this release
come out on the schedule previously discussed. 8.4 slipped quite a
bit for reasons that were, IMHO, quite preventable: and, worse, it's
not clear that the slippage really bought us anything, because we
still ended up with a bunch of embarassing bugs. Having said that,
I'm not capable of single-handedly effecting an on-time release, and I
don't particularly want to. In a community where people can disappear
or change roles in the snap of a finger, it's bad to be relying on any
one person to do too much. We need larger, more robust pools of
committers, reviewers, commitfest managers, etc.

Perhaps for next release we should consider spacing the CommitFests
out a little more. I think one CommitFest every 2 months is a little
too tight a schedule. As Peter and others have mentioned previously,
it doesn't leave a lot of time to work on your own patches (behold the
lack of any of my patches in this CommitFest). I think a CommitFest
every 3 months would be too long, but maybe something in the middle.
The trick is to navigate around major holidays while ending around the
right time. Possibly the amount of time between CommitFests doesn't
even need to be constant throughout the release cycle - maybe shorter
at the beginning and longer towards the end.

> Looking at the submissions so far, it seems you've done such a grand job
> at clearing the backlog that there are few patches in the next fest.

Thanks for your kind words. It does seem that most of the major
patches we've seen so far landed last CommitFest, with the exception
of HS and SR. That's not all me, of course - among other people, Tom
did a tremendous amount of work - but I'm glad I was able to help move
it along.

...Robert