Re: Commitfest problems - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 11:09:34AM +0000, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 16/12/14 07:33, David Rowley wrote:
> 
> > On 16 December 2014 at 18:18, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com
> > <mailto:josh@agliodbs.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     > Man. You're equating stuff that's not the same. You didn't get your way
> >     > (and I'm tentatively on your side onthat one) and take that to imply
> >     > that we don't want more reviewers.
> > 
> >     During that thread a couple people said that novice reviewers added no
> >     value to the review process, and nobody argued with them then.  I've
> >     also been told this to my face at pgCon, and when I've tried organizing
> >     patch review events.  I got the message, which is why I stopped trying
> >     to get new reviewers.
> > 
> >     And frankly: if we're opposed to giving credit to patch reviewers, we're
> >     opposed to having them.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I'd just like to add something which might be flying below the radar of
> > more senior people. There are people out there  (ike me)  working on
> > PostgreSQL more for the challenge and perhaps the love of the product,
> > who make absolutely zero money out of it. For these people getting
> > credit where it's due is very important. I'm pretty happy with this at
> > the moment and I can't imagine any situation where not crediting
> > reviewers would be beneficial to anyone.
> 
> This is exactly where I am at the moment, having previously been more
> involved with the development side of PostgreSQL during the past.
> 
> Personally having a credit as a patch reviewer isn't particularly
> important to me, since mail archives are good enough these days that if
> people do query my contributions towards projects then I can point them
> towards any reasonable search engine.
> 
> The biggest constraint on my ability to contribute is *time*.
> 
> Imagine the situation as a reviewer that I am currently on the mailing
> list for two well-known open source projects and I also have a day job
> and a home life to contend with.
> 
> For the spare time that I have for review, one of these projects
> requires me to download attachment(s), apply them to a git tree
> (hopefully it still applies), run a complete "make check" regression
> series, try and analyse a patch which will often reference parts to
> which I have no understanding, and then write up a coherent email and
> submit it to the mailing list. Realistically to do all this and provide
> a review that is going to be of use to a committer is going to take a
> minimum of 1-2 hours, and even then there's a good chance that I've
> easily missed obvious bugs in the parts of the system I don't understand
> well.
> 
> For the second project, I can skim through my inbox daily picking up
> specific areas I work on/are interested in, hit reply to add a couple of
> lines of inline comments to the patch and send feedback to the
> author/list in just a few minutes.

With utmost respect, you've missed something really important in the
second that the first has, and frankly isn't terribly onerous: does an
actual system produce working code?  In the PostgreSQL case, you can
stop as soon as you discover that the patch doesn't apply to master or
that ./configure doesn't work, or that the code doesn't compile:
elapsed time <= 5 minutes.  Or you can keep moving until you have made
progress for the time you've allotted.

But the bigger issue, as others have pointed out, has never been a
technical one.  It's motivating people whose time is already much in
demand to spend some of it on reviewing.

I wasn't discouraged by the preliminary patch review process or any
feedback I got.  My absence lately has more to do with other demands
on my time.

Cheers,
David.
-- 
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@gmail.com

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