On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of mié abr 11 12:44:02 -0300 2012:
>> Me neither, but I don't know how far it scales. Having certain people
>> who are defined as, say, doc-only committers will not only make it
>> clear to those people what they're expected to commit, but also clear
>> to everyone else who the people are who might commit any given patch
>> they might write. If we just end up with 50 committers and you have
>> to follow pgsql-hackers to understand who knows what and which people
>> are even still around, it's not going to make anything easier for
>> anyone.
>
> Since we're so keen on copying what Linux does, we could just have a
> MAINTAINERS file.
I'm actually not particularly keen on copying what Linux does. It
seems that they have a lot of the same problems that we have, only
worse. Unless you can get the proper person to take notice of your
patch and merge it into his tree, from where it will get merged into
somebody else's tree, from where it will eventually get merged into
Linus's tree (maybe with one more tree in the path just for good
measure), your patch is just going to fall on the floor and die. The
lseek contention stuff in Linux 3.2 was submitted in substantially
identical form years ago and didn't get merged - mostly, AFAICT, just
because nobody cared about it enough.
Our process is not perfect, but in recent years we have at least done
a fairly good job preventing things from dying of apathy, even if not
everybody agrees on which things ultimately should or should not have
gotten committed. Small doc changes might be an exception. I used to
apply those regularly, but I've had to fall back to making occasional
sweeps of my pgsql-docs email box and looking for unresolved issues.
Having a few more committers, and specifically people focused on
documentation, would, I think, be a a step forward.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
