On 10 April 2012 16:51, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> When these things are pointed out to the people who are doing them,
> the response is often either (a) this feature is so important we're
> all going to die if it's not in the release how can you even think
> about bouncing it or (b) I'm not really still hacking on it these are
> all just minor changes. It's surprisingly easy to hoodwink even
> experienced contributors into thinking that your patch is really,
> really almost done, honest, it just needs a couple more tweaks when in
> fact it's nowhere close. I try not to attribute to bad faith what can
> be explained by incurable optimism, so maybe we just have a lot of
> incurable optimism. But it's doing nobody any good.
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 by asserting
dubiously that it's ready-for-committer, or maybe they really do
incorrectly believe it to be so, or maybe, unlike you, they understand
that term to mean "I've done as much as I can, as has my reviewer", or
whatever. To play devil's advocate, that might be an anti-social act,
but at a certain point, who wants to be the last honest sap? Besides,
isn't everyone's crime no crime at all?
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.
--
Peter Geoghegan http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
