Re: The purpose of the core team - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

<div dir="ltr">+1 <br /><div class="gmail_extra"><br /><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 5:12 PM, Robert
Haas<span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:robertmhaas@gmail.com" target="_blank">robertmhaas@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br/><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On
Tue,Jun 9, 2015 at 6:35 PM, Bruce Momjian <<a href="mailto:bruce@momjian.us">bruce@momjian.us</a>> wrote:<br />
>There has been some confusion by old and new community members about the<br /> > purpose of the core team, and
thislack of understanding has caused some<br /> > avoidable problems.  Therefore, the core team has written a core
charter<br/> > and published it on our website:<br /> ><br /> >         <a
href="http://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/"rel="noreferrer"
target="_blank">http://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/</a><br/> ><br /> > Hopefully this will be helpful to
people.<br/><br /> I believe the core team is suffering from a lack of members who are<br /> involved in writing,
reviewing,and committing patches.  Those things<br /> are not core functions of the core team, as that charter
illustrates.<br/> However, the core team needs to know when it should initiate a<br /> release, and to do that it needs
tounderstand the impact of bugs that<br /> have been fixed and bugs that have not been fixed.  The recent<br />
discussionof multixacts seems to indicate that the number of core<br /> team members who had a clear understanding of
theissues was zero,<br /> which I view as unfortunate.  The core team also needs to make good<br /> decisions about who
shouldbe made a committer, and the people who are<br /> doing reviews and commits of other people's patches are in the
best<br/> position to have an informed opinion on that topic.<br /><br /> As a non-core team member, I find it quite
frustratingthat getting a<br /> release triggered requires emailing a closed mailing list.  I am not a<br /> party to
allof the discussion on my request, and the other people who<br /> might know whether my request is technically sound
ornot are not<br /> party to that discussion either.  I disagreed with the decision to<br /> stamp 9.4.3 without
waitingfor<br /> b6a3444fa63519a0192447b8f9a332dddc66018f, but of course I couldn't<br /> comment on it, because it was
decidedin a forum in which I don't get<br /> to participate, on a thread on which I was not copied.  I realize<br />
that,because decisions about whether to release and when to release<br /> often touch on security issues, not all of
thisdiscussion can be<br /> carried on in public.  But when the cone of secrecy is drawn in so<br /> tightly that
excludeseveryone who actually understands the technical<br /> issues related to the proposed release, we have lost our
way,and do<br /> our users a disservice.<br /><br /> I am not sure whether the solution to this problem is to add
more<br/> people to the core team, or whether the solution is to move release<br /> timing decisions and committer
selectionout of the core team to some<br /> newly-created group.  But I believe that change is needed.<br /><span
class="HOEnZb"><fontcolor="#888888"><br /> --<br /> Robert Haas<br /> EnterpriseDB: <a
href="http://www.enterprisedb.com"rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.enterprisedb.com</a><br /> The Enterprise
PostgreSQLCompany<br /><br /><br /> --<br /> Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (<a
href="mailto:pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org">pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org</a>)<br/> To make changes to your
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