Re: commit fests (was Re: primary key error message)

On tor, 2010-01-21 at 19:45 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> Well, that does seem to be endorsing a sort of two-tiered system.

In those words, yes, it's a multi-tiered system.  The aim of the commit
fests is to make the "lower" tier more effective, but not necessarily to
bring the "upper" tier to a near halt.

> If I submit a patch and nobody looks at it, I can decide that silence
> means approval and commit it.  If someone who is not a committer does
> the same thing, it dies, no matter how technically excellent it is.  I
> am no longer in a position to be bothered by that, but I think if I
> were not a committer I might be.  I wonder what others think about
> this.

Well, you have worked hard to get to that position, so those are the
perks.

> There's another issue, too.  If a committer submits a patch, everybody
> else who cares about the issue has to drop what they're doing and look
> at it.  Because if they don't, there's a good chance that in 24 hours
> plus or minus, it'll be in the tree.  Several patches have blown by me
> in the last month or two - already committed before I got around to
> reading them, and I might have had an opinion on them, but it's too
> late to do anything about it now.  I mean, it's not, really: I could
> still ask for something to be changed, but it's an uphill battle at
> this point.

That would seem to ask that all committers funnel their patches through
the commit fest process.  That might technically and morally be the
right thing, but it would probably not be a popular or realistic
proposal.