Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose

Hi,

The original intent of CommitFests, and of commitfest.postgresql.org
by extension, was to provide a place where patches could be registered
to indicate that they needed to be reviewed, thus enabling patch
authors and patch reviewers to find each other in a reasonably
efficient way. I don't think it's working any more. I spent a good
deal of time going through the CommitFest this week, and I didn't get
through a very large percentage of it, and what I found is that the
status of the patches registered there is often much messier than can
be captured by a simple "Needs Review" or "Waiting on Author," and the
number of patches that are actually in need of review is not all that
large. For example, there are:

- patches parked there by a committer who will almost certainly do
something about them after we branch
- patches parked there by a committer who probably won't do something
about them after we branch, but maybe they will, or maybe somebody
else will, and anyway this way we at least run CI
- patches parked there by a committer who may well do something about
them before we even branch, because they're not actually subject to
the feature freeze

- patches that we've said we don't want but the author thinks we do
(sometimes i agree with the author, sometimes not)
- patches that have long-unresolved difficulties which the author
either doesn't know how to solve or is in no hurry to solve
- patches that have already been reviewed by multiple people, often
including several committers, and which have been updated multiple
times, but for one reason or another, not committed

- patches that actually do need to be reviewed

I think there are a couple of things that have led to this state of
affairs. First, we got tired of making people mad by booting their
stuff out of the CommitFest, so we mostly just stopped doing it, even
if it had 0% chance of being committed this CommitFest, and really
even if it had a 0% chance of being committed ever.

Second, we added
CI, which means that there is positive value to registering the patch
in the CommitFest even if committing it is not in the cards.

And those
things together have created a third problem, which is that the list
is now so long and so messy that even the CommitFest managers probably
don't manage to go through the whole thing thoroughly in a month.