Re: 8.5 development schedule - Mailing list pgsql-hackers
From | Robert Haas |
---|---|
Subject | Re: 8.5 development schedule |
Date | |
Msg-id | 603c8f070906300758v59fa4805u8bb4cc1816af3225@mail.gmail.com Whole thread Raw |
In response to | Re: 8.5 development schedule (Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>) |
Responses |
Re: 8.5 development schedule
(Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
|
List | pgsql-hackers |
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e@gmx.net> wrote: > On Tuesday 30 June 2009 16:50:55 Kevin Grittner wrote: >> > However, if anything, I think if anything we should go the other way >> > and start the first CommitFest July 15th. >> >> I'm curious what the counter-arguments to this are. Is it >> review-fatigue from getting the release out, or is there an economy of >> scale to building up a 100 patches before starting to review? Would >> reviewing these get some contributors moving again, thus boosting the >> total work hours available for the 8.5 release? Would it pull people >> off of WIP? > > Well, think about what could happen if we go this way. What you basically > have here are people who have essentially ignored the commitfest and beta > mandates and worked on new patches. Well, the only person who has proposed this so far is me, and I don't think there can be more than three or four people who are not committers who put in as much work into the November CommitFest as I did, and I've already volunteered to do more work for the next CommitFest. I'm not exactly sure what the beta mandate is, and I admit that I haven't done much beta-testing, but even just in the course of developing the patches I've submitted recently I've found several bugs which were fixed for 8.4 (try searching your -committers email for "Robert Haas"). I probably would not have found those bugs if I had just set out to "test 8.4", because I wouldn't have thought of those things, so I really feel that I have done as well as I can. If you disagree, we should discuss, perhaps off-list. At any rate, the idea that nobody is should do any development during the seven months for which the tree has been in feature freeze doesn't seem like a very good one. If we accept that proposition, then presumably nobody should also do any development during August, October, or December, since those months are set aside for CommitFests. Therefore, during calendar year 2009, there will be a total of 91 days during which people are allowed to work on their own patches, specifically July 1-July 31, September 1-September 30, and November 1-30. How are we going to move this project forward by telling people that they're only allowed to do development 25% of the days out of the year? And even if we do accept that proposition, my proposal to back everything up 15 days wouldn't change the total number of development days: it would add the second half of December at the expense of the second half of July. I'm of the opinion that the way that we should be striving to maximize the amount of useful development that gets done, and I think the way to do that is to give people prompt feedback on their patches. A lot of the people who have submitted patches for the next CommitFest are first-time or occasional contributors who may already have lost interest in the project; waiting longer to review those patches is not going to increase the chances that those people will eventually get more involved, either as patch authors or as patch reviewers. Others are people like Fujii Masao, Kevin Grittner, and Pavan Deolasee who, I venture to say, have done enough work on this project to deserve having their contributions reviewed in a timely fashion, regardless of exactly when they choose to do their development. There may be a few people who aren't carrying the burden of contributing back to the community, but I don't think it's anything like a majority. > And they now get to say, because we > already have enough patches, let's start the commit fest early. And then the > same people might ignore the commitfest mandate again and produce another 100 > patches by the time this commit fest ends. So let's start the next commit > fest right after this one. I don't think we have "enough" patches; I'm not sure what that means. Enough for what? It would be great if we had more patches, assuming that they were of good quality and did useful things to advance PostgreSQL. What I think we have is a lot of people who are waiting for feedback, and we should try to give them some. I also know that reviewing 60 patches for the November CommitFest was a ton of work, and the reviewers (including the committers) ran out of steam well before we got done. That, and not any desire to jump the queue, is the reason why I would like to get the reviewing process started before the patch list grows unmanageably large. ...Robert
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