Re: postponing some large patches to 9.2

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> wrote:
> On the flip side, if we don't provide review to WIP patches during the
> 3rd commitfest, how do we expect to get anything close to committable on
> the 1st commitfest of the next cycle?

I'm not sure exactly what you're going for here, because I don't think
I've ever proposed any special treatment of patches in the third
CommitFest, and as far as I can remember everything got reviewed
except for the two Tom promised to pick up and then sat on. But if
you were to say that WIP patches *in general* get a lot less review
than non-WIP patches, I would agree with you.

To some extent, I think that's inevitable. It's not fun to review WIP
patches. When you come across something that's screwed up, you say to
yourself - I could mention this in the review, but maybe the author
already knows about it. After all, it's WIP. In other words, it's
hard to know what you should be looking for. I've found that it's
nearly always better to post specific questions that you want to know
the answer to, rather than a patch where people have to guess what
parts you want feedback on.

Now, once the patch is code-complete, I think we should review it.
And I think we usually do a fairly good job with that, even as late as
CF3. It's really CF4 where I think we get a bit less excited about
reviewing patches that aren't going to make the release anyway, and
that's not a great thing, but as procedural defects go it seems better
than most. Yeah, there won't be a lot of big patches committed in
9.2CF1; we don't have the bandwidth to review major patches and get
betas out the door at the same time, or at least we haven't in the
past. But as long as the big patches that would have made 9.2CF1 still
make it into the release, that doesn't seem like a disaster. On the
flip side, if a few more people want to step out and help get the open
items closed, I'd be more than happy to spend the time that I would
otherwise have spent on that reviewing major feature patches for 9.2,
where there's a CommitFest in progress or not.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company