On Mon, Apr 8, 2024 at 11:48 AM Matthias van de Meent
<boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com> wrote:
> I also think there is already a big issue with a lack of interest in
> getting existing patches from non-committers committed, reducing the
> set of patches that could be considered is just cheating the numbers
> and discouraging people from contributing. For one, I know I have
> motivation issues keeping up with reviewing other people's patches
> when none (well, few, as of this CF) of my patches get reviewed
> materially and committed. I don't see how shrinking the window of
> opportunity for significant review from 9 to 7 months is going to help
> there.
>
> So, I think that'd be counter-productive, as this would get the
> perverse incentive to band-aid over (architectural) issues to limit
> churn inside the patch, rather than fix those issues in a way that's
> appropriate for the project as a whole.
I don't think you're wrong about any of this, but I don't think Tom
and I are wrong to be upset about the volume of last-minute commits,
either. There's a lot of this stuff that could have been committed a
month ago, or two months ago, or six months ago, and it just wasn't. A
certain amount of that is, as Heikki says, understandable and
expected. People procrastinate. But, if too many people procrastinate
too much, then it becomes a problem, and if you don't do anything
about that problem then, well, you still have one.
I don't want more barriers to getting stuff committed here either, but
I also don't want somebody whose 100-line patch is basically unchanged
since last July to commit it 19 hours before the feature freeze
deadline[1]. That's just making everyone's life more difficult. If
that patch happens to have been submitted by a non-committer, that
non-committer waited an extra 9 months for the commit, not knowing
whether it would actually happen, which like you say is demotivating.
And if it was the committer's own patch then it was probably going in
sooner or later, barring objections, so basically, they just deprived
the project of 9 months of in-tree testing that the patch could have
had basically for free. There's simply no world in which this kind of
behavior is actually helpful to committers, non-committers, reviews,
or the project in general.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
[1] This is a fictional example, I made up these numbers without
checking anything, but I think it's probably not far off some of what
actually happened.