Re: Lock Wait Statistics (next commitfest)

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Mark Kirkwood
<mark.kirkwood@catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> This might be my fault, so I apologize for killing your enthusiasm.  I
>> think when I get wrapped up in a CommitFest (and especially during the
>> second half) I get wound up in determining whether or not things are
>> going to get applied and tend to give short shrift to thinks that seem
>> like they won't.  My bad.
>>
>> Generally speaking, I am always in favor of adding things to the
>> CommitFest, but I guess the one exception I would make is if there are
>> outstanding comments already given that haven't been addressed yet.
>> In that case it seems a little unfair to ask people to review it
>> further unless there are very specific questions you need answered.  I
>> think you were good about communicating that the patch wasn't ready to
>> be applied yet, but I also think that it's to be expected that you'll
>> get less feedback while it's in that state.
>
> Yeah, makes sense, altho perhaps there needs to be a way to get incremental
> progress reviewed?

I think it's possible to get that, but there's a certain way you need
to ask.  As a general rule, anything that is of the form "here's my
code, can you take a look" gets less attention - with the possible
except of a patch from a committer who is planning to commit it if no
one writes back.  And even then it often doesn't get looked at.  Code
dumps are just no fun.  Now if you write something like "here's my
patch... I can't quite finish it because of X and I'm not sure whether
the best solution is Y or Z", those tend to get answered a lot more
often, at least IME.  Reading a patch and trying to understand what
it's doing and why it's doing it and whether it's really the best
solution is a fairly time-consuming effort; giving the reader some
context makes that a lot easier, and so people are more likely to help
you if you do it, again IME.

...Robert