Robert Haas wrote:
> Tom and Bruce do give way before a clear consensus, but on the other
> hand I think Simon is right that there was never much chance of
> getting anything committed here without Heikki's endorsement, which
> was slow in coming by his own admission. (I'm not in any way saying
> he was wrong to withhold his endorsement, just that he did.)
>
> I think it's undeniable that the voices of the committers carry
> significantly more weight than those of others on this mailing list,
> and especially that of Tom because of the sheer volume of what he
> commits compared to anyone else. Having one of the committers say
> that they don't like your patch doesn't completely kill its chances of
> getting accepted, but it definitely turns it into an uphill battle.
> On the other hand, if one of the committers takes a fancy to your
> patch it will occasionally jump ahead of the queue and get reviewed or
> committed before patches submitted much earlier. And more than one
> committer got features into 8.4 that were not really done in time for
> the 11/08 CommitFest, and likely would have been rejected if they'd
> come from a non-committer.
>
> As a thought experiment, consider two patches, one of which has a +1
> from Tom Lane and a -1 from some other respected community member who
> is not a committer, and the other of which has a +1 from the community
> member and a -1 from Tom Lane. Which do you think is more likely to
> get committed? I know what I'd pick.
>
> Now, in many cases, the fact that the committers speak with the
> loudest voices is a good thing, because they are mostly very good
> coders with lots of PostgreSQL experience and a proven track record of
> not breaking the tree too often. But that doesn't make it any less
> true.
The above comments by Robert are very perceptive, and there is certainly
truth that committer-endorsed patches are applied quicker than others.
My only additional comment is that over time, reliable patch submitters
become committers, so hopefully things balance out over time.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
