Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

On 10.05.2011 04:43, Greg Smith wrote:

Josh Berkus wrote:

As I don't think we can change this, I think the best answer is to
tell people
"Don't submit a big patch to PostgreSQL until you've done a few small
patches first. You'll regret it".

When I last did a talk about getting started writing patches, I had a
few people ask me afterwards if I'd ever run into problems with having
patch submissions rejected. I said I hadn't. When asked what my secret
was, I told them my first serious submission modified exactly one line
of code[1]. And *that* I had to defend in regards to its performance
impact.[2]

Anyway, I think the intro message should be "Don't submit a big patch to
PostgreSQL until you've done a small patch and some patch review"
instead though.

Well, my first patch was two-phase commit. And I had never even used PostgreSQL before I dived into the source tree and started to work on that. I did, however, lurk on the pgsql-hackers mailing list for a few months before posting, so I knew the social dynamics. I basically did exactly what Robert described elsewhere in this thread, and successfully avoided the culture shock.