Re: CommitFest 2011-11 Update - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

It's time for another one of these again.  We're now just past the 
nominal 1 month goal of each CommitFest, and as you can obviously see 
from my list traffic I'm trying to close things up.

One of the CF goals is to give everyone who submits something a fair 
review.  There are a few patches that haven't gotten any full review yet.

"Collect frequency statistics and selectivity estimation for arrays":  
this area is tough to find help on.  I've been in touch with Nathan 
Boley recently and he does intend to get to this one soon.  Not chasing 
this down earlier is my bad.  If anyone else is interested in this area, 
please let me know.  I hope we get something soon from Nathan, but would 
like to have a backup plan in case he continues to be too busy to work 
on it.

Neither of the two pg_stat_statements enhancement patches have gotten a 
review yet.  The one Peter G has been working on has gotten regular 
updates during the CF but hasn't been reviewed yet.  Daniel Farina has 
only had a few days where it was in a state he could do that against the 
last update, and there's been of system updates at Heroku keeping away 
during most of that.  This I intend to keep nudging forward myself.

A fourth patch is better but not treated well yet:

"Allow substitute allocator for PGresult":  Due to some mishandling on 
my side this didn't make it though a second pass of review yet, so it's 
state is a bit unknown still.

Then there are also another 5 patches that have been updated recently 
enough they might be ready to commit, but we're still looking for a 
final review on them first.  They are:

"pgsql_fdw contrib module" and the related "Join push-down for foreign 
tables".  I don't have a good feel for the order these two need to be 
applied in, or exactly where they stand right now.

"Fix Leaky Views Problem, again":  Robert is planning to look at this more

"avoid taking two snapshots per query":  Dimitri is done with this one 
now.  I think that moves this toward Ready for Committer, which in 
theory Robert could do himself now.  Playing around with this area seems 
complicated enough that it would be nice to have another committer look 
at this though.

"splitting plpython into smaller parts":  This was still being worked on 
by Peter E as of yesterday, so I'm assuming it's still viable to commit 
soon.

On a positive note, I seem to have unstuck two of the long running 
arguments this week.  "unite recovery.conf and postgresql.conf" has a 
potential path forward again.  I don't think we can just forget about 
executing on that until the last minute before the final CommitFest.  
Nailing down who is working on each of those moving parts is something 
we should do, but that seems unlikely to move until the other CF work is 
closed up though.

pg_last_xact_insert_timestamp thread has taken an odd turn from ready to 
commit back to receiving a set of alternate proposals.  The "primary 
keepalive" patch and "archive_keepalive_command" design proposal from 
Simon pair seem to add up to something that addresses the concerns I 
raised about computations from a single system and differences between 
transaction and WAL timing.  I'm finding myself on the hook for this 
area, so I'll try myself to help keep it from stalling again.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us