Re: CommitFest July Over - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Robert Treat wrote:
> On Monday 04 August 2008 15:38:35 Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Post-mortem things we've learned about the commitfest are:
>>
>> 1) It's hard to get anything done in June-July.
>>
> 
> True... vacations and conferences abound. September should be better in this 
> regard I would think. 

Um. Looking at my calendar, the second half of september and all of
october is packed solid with conferences. Unlike June, July & August
which were completely empty.

Perhaps it's a US vs EU thing?

(Vacations are July/August though, so that matches)


>> 2) The number of patches is going to keep increasing with each
>> commitfest.  As such, the patch list is going to get harder to deal
>> with.  We now urgently need to start working on CF management software.
>>
>> 3) Round Robin Reviewers didn't really work this time, aside from
>> champion new reviewer Abhjit.  For the most part, RRR who were assigned
>> patches did not review them for 2 weeks.  Two areas where this concept
>> needs to be improved:
>>     a) we need to assign RRR to patches two days after the start of
>> commitfest, not a week later;
> 
> This seems tricky, since you want people to volunteer to review patches 
> ideally, will two days be enough? Should people interested in reviewing be 
> signing up ahead of time? Looking at the next commitfest, it is going to 
> start on a Monday... maybe auto-assigning reviewers on Wednesday is OK. 

Um, didn't they already sign up ahead of time? We can't very well hand
out patches to someone who's not interested, can we?


>>     b) there needs to be the expectation that RRR will start reviewing or
>> reject the assignment immediately.
>>
> 
> I wonder if too much time was spent on patches like the WITH patch, which 
> seemed pretty early on it was not ready for commit... thoughts? 

I think that happens a lot. Once discussion "takes off" on a patch, it
attracts more people to comment on it, etc.

Plus the whole "hey, i've added a git repo" starts it's own thread :-P


>> 4) We need to work better to train up new reviewers.  Some major
>> committer(s) should have worked with Abhjit, Thomas and Martin
>> particularly on getting them to effectively review patches; instead,
>> committers just handled stuff *for* them for the most part, which isn't
>> growing our pool of reviewers.

True.


>> 5) Patch submitters need to understand that patch submission isn't
>> fire-and-forget.  They need to check back, and respond to queries from
>> reviewers.  Of course, a patch-tracker which automatically notified the
>> submitter would help.
>>
> 
> Reviewers should be responding to the email on -hackers that is pointed to by 
> the wiki, so patch submitters should be getting notified... right ?

Well, there's really no way to easily do that. I mean, you can't hit
"reply" once you find something in the archives. You'll need to manually
put everybody back in the CC list, so it's much easier to just post to
-hackers.

Thus, I think requiring the submitters to check back on -hackers
regularly is necessary, for now.


>> 6) Overall, I took a low-nag-factor approach to the first time as
>> commitfest manager.  This does not seem to have been the best way; I'd
>> suggest for september that the manager make more frequent nags.

Yes, agreed. The manager role was fairly invisible this time around, I
think we should at least try and see what happens.


>> Finally: who wants to be CF Manager for September?  I'm willing to do it
>> again, but maybe someone else should get a turn.
>>
> 
> Why stop now when you've got the momentum? :-) 
> 
> Seriously though, I thought we were supposed to have 2 people working as CF 
> Managers for each CF... is that not the case? 

Umm, IIRC we said one, but we'd rotate.

That said, I think it'd be a good idea if Josh continued across the next
one, given that this one was more or less a "trial run" for the CF
Manager thingy. We can start switching once the role is a bit more
defined. (This is all based on the fact that Josh says he's ok with
doing it, of course :-P)

//Magnus