Re: knngist patch support - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, Robert Haas wrote:

> 2010/2/11 Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su>:
>> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
>> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
>> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
>> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch. People with
>
> So...  I think the reason why there was no movement between November
> 25th and January 15th is because no CommitFest started between
> November 25th and January 15th.  Had you submitted the patch on
> November 14th, you would have gotten a lot more feedback in November;
> I agree that we don't have a lot of formal documentation about the
> CommitFest process, but I would think that much would be pretty clear,
> but maybe not.  The reason there was no movement after January 15th is
> because (1) I couldn't get anyone to volunteer to review it, except
> Mark Cave-Ayland who didn't actually do so (or anyway didn't post
> anything publicly), and (2) we were still working on rbtree.
>
> Personally, I am a little irritated about the whole way this situation
> has unfolded.  I devoted a substantial amount of time over my

Robert, please accept my public apology, if you feel I offense you. There are
nothing against you. Your contribution is very important and I really don't 
understand why on the Earth you're not paid ! I remember discussion 
to paid you from our foundation.  That's shame. 
Does nybody ever got support for development from our foundation ?

> Christmas vacation to patch review, and many of those patches went on
> to be committed.  Some of the patches I reviewed were yours.  I did
> not get paid one dime for any of that work.  I expressed candidly,
> from the very beginning, that getting such a large patch done by the
> end of this CommitFest would likely be difficult, especially given
> that it had two precursor patches.  In exchange for giving you my
> honest opinions about your patches two weeks before the scheduled
> start of the CommitFest, over my Christmas vacation, and for free, I
> got a long stream of complaints from you and others about how the
> process is unfair, and as nearly zero help making the prerequisite
> patches committable as it is possible for anyone to achieve.  It
> regularly took 4-6 days for a new version of the patch to appear, and
> as often as not questions in my reviews were ignored for days, if not
> weeks.  It took a LOT of iterations before my performance concerns
> were addressed; and I believe that process could have been done MUCH
> more quickly.

Robert, it's very hard to marshal all developers, who are not-paid people
with their regular duties and problems and their own interests in postgres.
You just discovered we have long-long
holidays in Russia, when people try to spend somewhere. I always beaten with
Christmas in December, when I tried to communicate with business people un US.
Earlier, we lived with this and our releases were faster. I'd not say, CF is
a step back, but  our system should have tolerance in time if we're 
open-source community, or go enterprize way  - we are all paid, we follow 
business plan, ... etc.  Something is really wrong, that's what I can say.

>
> Now, it is possible that as you are sitting there reading this email,
> you are thinking to yourself "well, your feedback didn't actually make
> that patch any better, so this whole thing is just pure
> obstructionism."  I don't believe that's the case, but obviously I'm
> biased and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  What I can tell
> you for sure is that all of my reviewing was done with the best of
> motivations and in a sincere attempt to do the right thing.
>
> You may be right that January 15th was a bad time to start a
> CommitFest, although it's very unclear to me why that might be.  At
> least in the US, the holidays are over long before January 15th, but
> we had a very small crop of reviewers this time around, and a number
> of them failed to review the patches they picked up, or did only a
> very cursory review.  It might be mentioned that if you have concerns
> about getting your own patches reviewed, you might want to think about
> reviewing some patches by other people.  Of the 60 patches currently
> in the 2010-01 CommitFest, I'm listed as a reviewer on 12 of them.
> Needless to say, if someone else had volunteered to do some or all of
> the review work on some of those patches, I would have had more time
> to work on other patches.

Robert, human resources are the main problem and, first of all,
our system should work for developers ! If we will not understand each other
and follow only some unclear rules, we'll lost current developers and will 
not attract new. We, probably, in our particulary case, will follow our
original suggestion -just contrib module, but I concern about future. Now I
have to think not just about algorithms and implementation, but about 
reviewer and current regulation.

    Regards,        Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83