Re: Commitfest problems

On 12/15/2014 02:08 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 2:24 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland
> <mark(dot)cave-ayland(at)ilande(dot)co(dot)uk> wrote:
>> However if it were posted as part of patchset with a subject of "[PATCH]
>> gram.y: add EXCLUDED pseudo-alias to bison grammar" then this may pique
>> my interest enough to review the changes to the grammar rules, with the
>> barrier for entry reduced to understanding just the PostgreSQL-specific
>> parts.
> Meh. Such a patch couldn't possibly compile or work without modifying
> other parts of the tree. And I'm emphatically opposed to splitting a
> commit that would have taken the tree from one working state to
> another working state into a series of patches that would have taken
> it from a working state through various non-working states and
> eventually another working state. Furthermore, if you really want to
> review that specific part of the patch, just look for what changed in
> gram.y, perhaps by applying the patch and doing git diff
> src/backend/parser/gram.y. This is really not hard.
>
> I certainly agree that there are cases where patch authors could and
> should put more work into decomposing large patches into bite-sized
> chunks. But I don't think that's always possible, and I don't think
> that, for example, applying BRIN in N separate pieces would have been
> a step forward. It's one feature, not many.
>

+1

I have in the past found the "bunch of patches" approach to be more that
somewhat troublesome, especially when one gets "here is an update to
patch nn of the series" and one has to try to compose a coherent set of
patches in order to test them. A case in point I recall was the original
Foreign Data Wrapper patchset.

cheers

andrew