Re: Commitfest problems

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> Robert Haas wrote:
>>> (I note that the proposal to have the CFM review everything is merely
>>> one way of meeting the need to have senior people spend more time
>>> reviewing. But I assure all of you that I spend as much time
>>> reviewing as I can find time for. If someone wants to pay me the same
>>> salary I'm making now to do nothing but review patches, I'll think
>>> about it. But even then, that would also mean that I wasn't spending
>>> time writing patches of my own.)

>> I have heard the idea of a "cross-company PostgreSQL foundation" of some
>> sort that would hire a developer just to manage commitfests, do patch
>> reviews, apply bugfixes, etc, without the obligations that come from
>> individual companies' schedules for particular development roadmaps,
>> customer support, and the like. Of course, only a senior person would
>> be able to fill this role because it requires considerable experience.

> Yeah, that would be great, and even better if we could get 2 or 3
> positions funded so that the success or failure isn't too much tied to
> a single individual. But even getting 1 position funded in a
> stable-enough fashion that someone would be willing to bet on it seems
> like a challenge. (Maybe other people here are less risk-averse than
> I am.)

Yeah, it would be hard to sell anyone on that unless the foundation
was so well funded that it could clearly afford to keep paying you
for years into the future.

I'm not really on board with the CFM-reviews-everything idea anyway.
I don't think that can possibly work well, because it supposes that senior
reviewers are interchangeable, which they aren't. Everybody's got pieces
of the system that they know better than other pieces.

Also, one part of the point of the review mechanism is that it's supposed
to provide an opportunity for less-senior reviewers to look at parts of
the code that they maybe don't know so well, and thereby help grow them
into senior people. If we went over to the notion of some one (or a few)
senior people doing all the reviewing, it might make the review process
more expeditious but it would lose the training aspect. Of course, maybe
the training aspect was never worth anything; I'm not in a position to
opine on that. But I don't really think that centralizing that
responsibility would be a good thing in the long run.

regards, tom lane