On 5/16/24 23:43, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > On 16.05.24 23:06, Joe Conway wrote: >> On 5/16/24 16:57, Jacob Champion wrote: >>> On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 1:31 PM Joe Conway <m...@joeconway.com> wrote: >>>> Maybe we should just make it a policy that *nothing* gets moved forward >>>> from commitfest-to-commitfest and therefore the author needs to care >>>> enough to register for the next one? >>> >>> I think that's going to severely disadvantage anyone who doesn't do >>> this as their day job. Maybe I'm bristling a bit too much at the >>> wording, but not having time to shepherd a patch is not the same as >>> not caring. >> >> Maybe the word "care" was a poor choice, but forcing authors to think >> about and decide if they have the "time to shepherd a patch" for the >> *next CF* is exactly the point. If they don't, why clutter the CF with >> it. > > Objectively, I think this could be quite effective. You need to prove > your continued interest in your project by pressing a button every two > months. > > But there is a high risk that this will double the annoyance for > contributors whose patches aren't getting reviews. Now, not only are > you being ignored, but you need to prove that you're still there every > two months. >
Yeah, I 100% agree with this. If a patch bitrots and no one cares enough to rebase it once in a while, then sure - it's probably fine to mark it RwF. But forcing all contributors to do a dance every 2 months just to have a chance someone might take a look, seems ... not great. I try to see this from the contributors' PoV, and with this process I'm sure I'd start questioning if I even want to submit patches. That is not to say we don't have a problem with patches that just move to the next CF, and that we don't need to do something about that ... Incidentally, I've been preparing some git+CF stats because of a talk I'm expected to do, and it's very obvious the number of committed (and rejected) CF entries is more or very stable over time, while the number of patches that move to the next CF just snowballs. My impression is a lot of these contributions/patches just never get the review & attention that would allow them to move forward. Sure, some do bitrot and/or get abandoned, and let's RwF those. But forcing everyone to re-register the patches over and over seems like "reject by default". I'd expect a lot of people to stop bothering and give up, and in a way that would "solve" the bottleneck. But I'm not sure it's the solution we'd like ... It does seem to me a part of the solution needs to be helping to get those patches reviewed. I don't know how to do that, but perhaps there's a way to encourage people to review more stuff, or review stuff from a wider range of contributors. Say by treating reviews more like proper contributions. Long time ago there was a "rule" that people submitting patches are expected to do reviews. Perhaps we should be more strict this. regards -- Tomas Vondra EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
