Re: Multi-xacts and our process problem

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 11:42 PM, Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com> wrote:
> it came out that most people had identified fklocks as the highest-risk 9.3
> patch. Here's an idea. Shortly after the 9.5 release notes draft, let's take
> a secret ballot to identify the changes threatening the most damage through
> undiscovered bugs. (Let's say the electorate consists of every committer and
> every person who reviewed at least one patch during the release cycle.)
> Publish the three top vote totals. This serves a few purposes. It sends a
> message to each original committer that the community doubts his handling of
> the change. The secret ballot helps voters be honest, and seven votes against
> your commit is hard to ignore. It's a hint to that committer to drum up more
> reviews and testing, to pick a simpler project next time, or even to revert.
> The poll results would also help target beta testing and post-commit reviews.
> For example, I would plan to complete a full post-commit review of one patch
> in the list.

The highest risk item identified for 9.4 was the B-Tree bug fix
patches, IIRC. It was certainly mentioned this time last year as the
most likely candidate (during the 2014 developer meeting). I'm
suspicious of this kind of ballot. While 9.4 has not been out for that
long, evidence that that B-Tree stuff is in any way destabilizing is
still thin on the ground, a year later.

Anyone that identified fklocks as the highest risk 9.3 item shouldn't
be too proud of their correct prediction. If you just look at the
release notes, it's completely obvious, even to someone who doesn't
know what a MultiXact is.
--
Peter Geoghegan