On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 8:45 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> > This policy isn't working.
>
> +1. I think this is more annoying than the status quo ante.
Although ... I do think it's spared me some rebasing pain, and that
does have some real value. I wonder if we could think of other
alternatives. For example, maybe we could have a bot. If you push a
commit that's not indented properly, the bot reindents the tree,
updates git-blame-ignore-revs, and sends you an email admonishing you
for your error. Or we could have a server-side hook that will refuse
the misindented commit, with some kind of override for emergency
situations. What I really dislike about the current situation is that
it's doubling down on the idea that committers have to be perfect and
get everything right every time. Turns out, that's hard to do. If not,
why do people keep screwing things up? Somebody could theorize - and
this seems to be Tom and Jelte's theory, though perhaps I'm
misinterpreting their comments - that the people who have made
mistakes here are just lazy, and what they need to do is up their
game.
But I don't buy that. First, I think that most of our committers are
pretty intelligent and hard-working people who are trying to do the
right thing. We can't all be Tom Lane, no matter how hard we may try.
Second, even if it were true that the offending committers are "just
lazy," all of our contributors and many senior non-committer
contributors are people who have put thousands, if not tens of
thousands, of hours into the project. Making them feel bad serves us
poorly. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether it's too much
of a pain for the perfect committers we'd like to have. It matters
whether it's too much of a pain for the human committers that we do
have.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
