Re: Patch committers

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>>
>> > For example, probably only Simon and Heikki are knowledge enough to
>> > apply the HS and SR patchs --- but those patch is handled.  The harder
>> > part is the other patches where there are only a small pool of people
>> > knowledgeable enough to apply the patch, but many of those knowledgeable
>> > people are tied up with non-community things.
>>
>> People learn to do this by doing it.  That's how you learned, and Tom
>> and Heikki.  Ultimately, it's a source code control system; if someone
>> screws up, we can always back it out.
>
> True, but even I avoid patches I don't understand, and "practicing" by
> applying them could lead to a very undesirable outcome, e.g.
> instability.

Well, if we're going to add committers (and I'm generally in favor of
that) we need to pick people who won't apply patches that they don't
understand. In a way, that's really the only HARD requirement for a
committer, I think. If someone doesn't understand any aspect of the
system well enough to commit patches, but they know that, then having
them as a committer will be useless, but not actively harmful (beyond
being a waste of time). On the other hand, someone who actually does
know some parts of the system well enough to commit patches but
doesn't have the discretion to avoid things that are more than they
can tackle will create chaos.

In other words, we should be looking for people who (1) know enough to
be able to commit at least some patches without breaking the world and
(2) are responsible enough to know which things they can commit and
which they should leave alone.

Of course, anyone you pick will probably make some mistakes, but
that's the general idea...

...Robert