Re: Commitfest problems - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 2:33 AM, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd just like to add something which might be flying below the radar of more
> senior people. There are people out there  (ike me)  working on PostgreSQL
> more for the challenge and perhaps the love of the product, who make
> absolutely zero money out of it. For these people getting credit where it's
> due is very important. I'm pretty happy with this at the moment and I can't
> imagine any situation where not crediting reviewers would be beneficial to
> anyone.

We routinely and regularly contribute reviews in the commit logs for
precisely this reason.  I don't think anyone is opposed to that.
There is some opposition to crediting them in the release notes
because the one time Bruce tried it made for an enormous volume of
additional text in the release notes, and there were cases where
people's names were mentioned on relatively equal footing when their
contributions were very much unequal.  For example, let's take a look
at the commit message for Hot Standby:
   Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki
Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and
two-phase commit.
   Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin
Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing,
Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback
from many other community members.

The release note ended up looking like this:

Allow a standby server to accept read-only queries (Simon Riggs,
Heikki Linnakangas)

Including all of the other names of people who made important
contributions, many of which consisted of reviewing, would make that
release note item - and many others - really, really long, so I'm not
in favor of that.  Crediting reviewers is important, but so is having
the release notes be readable.

It has been proposed that we do a general list of people at the bottom
of the release notes who helped review during that cycle.  That would
be less intrusive and possibly a good idea, but would we credit the
people who did a TON of reviewing?  Everyone who reviewed even one
patch?  Somewhere in between? Would committers be excluded because "we
just expect them to help" or included because credit is important to
established community members too?  To what extent would this be
duplicative of http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ ?
I'm not necessarily averse to doing something here, but the reason why
nothing has happened has much more to do with the fact that it's hard
to figure out exactly what the best thing would be than any idea that
"we don't want to credit reviewers".  We do want to credit reviewers,
AND WE DO, as a quick look at 'git log' will speedily reveal.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company