Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

All,

> Part of the trouble is in the question. Having a patch rejected is not
> really a problem; it's something you should learn from. I know it can be
> annoying. I get annoyed when it happens to me too. But I try to get over
> it as quickly as possible, and either fix the patch, or find another
> (and better) way to do the same thing, or move on. Everybody here is
> acting in good faith, and nobody's on a power trip. That's one of the
> good things about working on Postgres. If it were otherwise I would have
> moved on to something else long ago.

The problem is not that patches get rejected.  It's *how* they get
rejected, and how the submitter experiences the process of them getting
rejected.  Did they learn something from it and understand the reasons
for the rejection?  or did they experience the process as arbitrary,
frustrating, and incomprehesible?

Ideally, we want a sumbitter whose patch has been rejected to walk away
with either "my proposal was rejected, and I understand why it's a bad
idea even if I don't agree", or "my proposal was rejected, and I know
what needs to be done to fix it."

Of course, there are always idiots who won't learn anything no matter
how good our process is.  But if the whole submission process is
perceived to be fair and understandible, those will be a tiny minority.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com