Re: Commitfest 2023-03 starting tomorrow! - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 2023-Mar-20, Thomas Munro wrote:

> I realised that part of Alvaro's complaint was probably caused by
> cfbot's refusal to show any useful information just because it
> couldn't apply a patch the last time it tried.  A small improvement
> today: now it shows a ♲ symbol (with hover text "Rebase needed") if it
> doesn't currently apply, but you can still see the most recent CI test
> results.  And from there you can find your way to the parent commit
> ID.

Thank you for improving and continue to think about further enhancements
to the CF bot.  It has clearly improved our workflow a lot.

My complaint wasn't actually targetted at the CF bot.  It turns out that
I gave a talk on Friday at a private EDB mini-conference about the
PostgreSQL open source process; and while preparing for that one, I
ran some 'git log' commands to obtain the number of code contributors
for each release, going back to 9.4 (when we started using the
'Authors:' tag more prominently).  What I saw is a decline in the number
of unique contributors, from its maximum at version 12, down to the
numbers we had in 9.5.  We went back 4 years.  That scared me a lot.

So I started a conversation about that and some people told me that it's
very easy to be discouraged by our process.  I don't need to mention
that it's antiquated -- this in itself turns off youngsters.  But in
addition to that, I think newbies might be discouraged because their
contributions seem to go nowhere even after following the process.

This led me to suggesting that perhaps we need to be more lenient when
it comes to new contributors.  As I said, for seasoned contributors,
it's not a problem to keep up with our requirements, however silly they
are.  But people who spend their evenings a whole week or month trying
to understand how to patch for one thing that they want, to be received
by six months of silence followed by a constant influx of "please rebase
please rebase please rebase", no useful feedback, and termination with
"eh, you haven't rebased for the 1001th time, your patch has been WoA
for X days, we're setting it RwF, feel free to return next year" ...
they are most certainly off-put and will *not* try again next year.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera               48°01'N 7°57'E  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Por suerte hoy explotó el califont porque si no me habría muerto
 de aburrido"  (Papelucho)