Perhaps we should change the process so that it is the patch author's responsibility to find a reviewer, and a committer, for the patch. If you can't cajole anyone to review your patch, it's a sign that no-one cares about it, and the patch is rejected by default. Or put a quick +1/-1 voting option to each patch in the commitfest, to get a quick gauge of how the committers feel about it.
Again, that process would favor existing contributors and other folks who know how to "work the Postgres community". It would be effectively the same as hanging up a sign which says "no new contributors wanted". It would also be dramatically increasing the amount of politics around submitted patches, which take up far more time than the technical work.
I was thinking that by getting candid feedback that none of the existing contributors are interested to look at your patch, the author could revise the patch to garner more interest, or perhaps promise to review someone else's patch in return. Right now, the patches just linger, and the author doesn't know why, what's going to happen or what to do about it.
I agree. Having your patch disappear into the void is not friendly at all. But I don't think a commentless "-1" is the answer, either. That might one of the few things worse than silence. Even if the comment is just "This seems awfully complicated for a minimally useful feature" or "This will probably have unintended side effects in the executor that I don't have time to trace down, can someone make an argument for correctness", or even "this format is unreadable, I won't review this until it is fixed" then at least the author (and perhaps more important, junior contributors who are not the author) will know either what argument to make to lobby for it, what avenue to take when reviewing it, or whether to just forget it and work on something more important.
