Re: Why don't we have a small reserved OID range for patch revisions?

On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 7:59 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I don't think this is the worst proposal ever. However, I also think
> that it's not unreasonable to raise the issue that writing OR
> reviewing OR committing a patch already involves adhering to a thicket
> of undocumented rules. When somebody fails to adhere to one of those
> rules, they get ignored or publicly shamed. Now you want to add yet
> another step to the process - really two.

There does seem to be a real problem with undocumented processes. For
example, I must confess that it came as news to me that we already had
a reserved OID range. However, I don't think that there is that much
of an issue with adding new mechanisms like this, provided it makes it
easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. What Tom
has proposed so far is not something that self-evidently meets that
standard, but it's also not something that self-evidently fails to
meet that standard.

I have attempted to institute some general guidelines for what the
thicket of rules are by creating the "committing checklist" page. This
is necessarily imperfect, because the rules are in many cases open to
interpretation, often for good practical reasons. I don't have any
sympathy for committers that find it hard to remember to do a
catversion bump with any kind of regularity. That complexity seems
inherent, not incidental, since it's often convenient to ignore
catalog incompatibilities during development.

> So, I suspect that for every
> unit of work it saves somebody, it's probably going to generate about
> one unit of extra work for somebody else.

Maybe so. I think that you're jumping to conclusions, though.

> A lot of projects have a much less painful process for getting patches
> integrated than we do. I don't know how those projects maintain
> adequate code quality, but I do know that making it easy to get a
> patch accepted makes people more likely to contribute patches, and
> increases overall development velocity. It is not even vaguely
> unreasonable to worry about whether making this more complicated is
> going to hurt more than it helps, and I don't know why you think
> otherwise.

But you seem to want to make the mechanism itself even more
complicated, not less complicated (based on your remarks about making
OID assignment happen during the build). In order to make the use of
the mechanism easier. That seems worth considering, but ISTM that this
is talking at cross purposes. There are far simpler ways of making it
unlikely that a committer is going to miss this step. There is also a
simple way of noticing that they do quickly (e.g. a simple buildfarm
test).

> Right now every entry in pg_proc.dat includes an OID assignment. What
> I'm proposing is that we would also allow entries that did not have
> one, and the build process would assign one while processing the .dat
> files. Then later, somebody could use a script that went through and
> rewrote the .dat file to add OID assignments to any entries that
> lacked them. Since the topic of having tools for automated rewrite of
> those files has been discussed at length, and since we already have a
> script called reformat_dat_file.pl in the tree which contains
> comments indicating that it could be modified for bulk editing, said
> script having been committed BY YOU, I don't understand why you think
> that bulk editing is infeasible.

I'm also curious to hear what Tom thinks about this.

> OK. Well, I think that doing nothing is superior to this proposal,
> for reasons similar to what Peter Eisentraut has already articulated.
> And I think rather than blasting forward with your own preferred
> alternative in the face of disagreement, you should be willing to
> discuss other possible options. But if you're not willing to do that,
> I can't make you.

Peter seemed to not want to do this on the grounds that it isn't
necessary at all, whereas you think that it doesn't go far enough. If
there is a consensus against what Tom has said, it's a cacophonous one
that cannot really be said to be in favor of anything.

--
Peter Geoghegan