Re: Patch committers

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Now those criteria were developed to deal mainly with people committing
> their own patches.  What we have at the moment is a lot of patches
> coming in from people who aren't ready to be committers, and maybe don't
> ever want to be.  The question is how to do an adequate job of reviewing
> their patches, when only a fraction of the existing committers are
> willing to put time into reviewing other people's patches.  (Let's face
> it, that's a lot less fun than writing your own code.)

I kind of like reviewing, actually. It's a good way to get familiar
with new parts of the code. That's part of the coolness of open
source: other people do a lot of your work for you. Of course, that
doesn't mean I would want to ONLY review other people's patches and
never write any of my own.

> While I'm not
> against promoting more committers to deal with the influx of patches,
> the only way I know for people to get to the skill level of being fully
> competent reviewers is to have done a lot of patch writing themselves.
>
> Years ago, somebody (I think one of the original Berkeley crew) remarked
> "this project doesn't need a lot of people with a little time, it needs
> a few people with a lot of time".  I'm afraid that's still true, and
> it's still hard to find those people.

No, I think it's hard to find those people's salaries. I feel like
I've managed a fairly good stream of patches given that this is
something I do mostly between 8 PM and midnight after working a full
day and in between other things that I need to get done, but if I were
getting paid to hack on PostgreSQL full time (or even one or two days
a week) that stream would be a whole lot bigger.

...Robert