On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
> Simon Riggs wrote:
>>
>> My experience is that consensus/votes will be overruled by final
>> committer, if they disagree,
>
> That's a fairly strong statement. I can't think of an occasion when this has
> happened on any matter of significance, and I can remember many times when
> Tom, Bruce and others have bowed to the consensus despite their own
> preferences.
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.
...Robert
