Re: Assisting developers

On Jul 13, 2004, at 17:02, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> One failing that has appeared during the 7.5 development cycle is that
> we as a community haven't been able to provide timely feedback to
> developers working on large feature additions.
>
> I am particularly thinking of Alvaro (nested transactions) and Simon
> (PITR), where we haven't been able to give them sufficient feedback to
> make them fully productive.

I'm just a bystander here, but it seems to me that in-depth discussion
of a feature only starts when someone realizes that he must speak now
or the darn thing might get committed. In other words, the emphasis is
placed in preventing something half-baked getting included. And that's
perfectly natural because it is much easier and quicker than commenting
thoughtfully on every idea that someone might come up with.

But it of course means that the price of admission is a patch that
poses a real risk of getting committed.
From a pure resource utilization perspective, I don't see a way around
this. There's not enough expertise of pgsql internals to go around. As
long as that's the case, there will always be a barrier to entry. But
a high-risk patch isn't the only thing that can get you over such
a barrier; the only thing to control the distribution of this scarce
resource.

Cash comes to mind as an alternative.

mk