Re: Last gasp - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Peter Geoghegan <peter@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> I think that you may be missing the greater point here. The people
> that do this are kind of like the defectors in prisoner's dilemma - at
> a certain point, some people cannot resist the temptation to push
> their own patch forward at the expense of others ...

The question is - what exactly are we supposed to do about that?  I
think that when prisoner A rats out prisoner B and prisoner B spends
10 years in Leavenworth, prisoner B is unlikely to be very happy with
the situation, even though he's surely not confused about *why*
prisoner A did it.  So here.  If we accept your argument that some
people simply cannot help themselves, then the only solution is to
make it cease to be a prisoner's dilemma, and that can only be done by
changing the incentives, which presumably means handing down
punishments to people who push their own patches forward at the
expense of others.  Unless we care to choose a benevolent dictator, I
don't see any way to accomplish that.

It's feasible to think that we might be able to streamline the process
of booting patches that are not close to committable at the start of a
CommitFest, and especially at the start of the final CommitFest.  For
example, limiting patches to a small number of days in the "Waiting on
Author" state would help a great deal.  But the more general problem
of people arguing that *their* patch is the special one without which
the earth will cease to revolve about its axis is more difficult to
solve, or that it's ready when it's really not, is more difficult to
solve.  How would you propose we deal with that problem?

> ISTM that this is symptomatic of the wider problem of a dire shortage
> of committer resources. 100% of my non-doc patches so far have been
> committed by 3 people. I would really like to see us figure out a way
> of making more hackers committers, perhaps subject to certain
> conditions that don't currently exist for committers. You might find
> that given commit bits, some people will take their responsibilities
> as a reviewer far more seriously. Maybe you don't think that any of
> the likely candidates are quite ready for that responsibility, but you
> must admit that it's a serious problem.

I don't agree with that.  I think that there are a few people who
don't now have commit bits who should be given them - in particular,
Fujii Masao and Kevin Grittner, both of whom have been doing
consistently excellent work for several years.   But giving people a
commit bit in the hopes that they will do better reviews seems
completely backwards to me: we should instead give commit bits to
people who have *already* demonstrated that they can be trusted to do
good reviews and exercise good judgement, and no one else.

The fact is that we have no shortage of committers - there are 19
people who have access to push code into our master git repository.  A
handful of those people have basically completely left the project and
their commit rights should probably be revoked on that basis; most of
them are still involved in one way or another but just not able to
devote a lot of time to reviewing other people's code.  The problem is
even more acute for large patches, which only a handful of people are
qualified to review, and which also take a lot of wall clock time to
review thoroughly.  But that's not a problem that's going to go away
because we make more committers.  Giving more people the ability to
commit stuff will neither force them to devote time to it nor make
them qualified to do it if they aren't already.

Every time someone's favorite patch gets rejected, there is an outcry
of - the standards for commit are too high!  But this overlooks the
fact that there are some people who regularly meet them.  A patch from
Fujii Masao, Kevin, or Noah is about ten times more likely to be
applied without comment than one from the average submitter.  That's
not because I like them (although I have to admit to liking Kevin
quite a lot; I have met Fujii Masao at most briefly and Noah not at
all), or because I necessarily care about their patches more than
anyone else's; it's because they do really good work.  Over time, such
people tend to become committers, and then everyone complains that the
committers have high standards.  Well, yes.  They are committers
*because* they have high standards, and that is exactly as it should
be.

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