Alexander Borisov <[email protected]> writes:
> I have a question for the community. While waiting for feedback on my
> own patches, I was wondering: is there value in me reviewing other
> people's patches, even though I am not a committer here?
Yes, absolutely. Even if you don't catch every problem that a
person with committer-level experience might catch, every problem
you do catch is one less thing for the eventual committer to deal
with.
Another reason why we encourage people of all experience levels
to do code reviews is that that is amazingly useful for gaining
familiarity with the Postgres code base, which is important for
becoming a more senior-level contributor. Committers don't appear
out of nowhere; they gained the necessary knowledge by working on
patches, both their own and others'.
> I’ve been around here for over a year, and sometimes it feels like the
> project lacks a dedicated coordinator to direct contributor and reviewer
> efforts. Because of this, I'm not always sure which patches deserve
> attention first.
You presume a degree of top-down organization that doesn't exist
around here. People work on whatever catches their fancy (or,
perhaps, what their company wants them to work on ... but that is no
business of the community at large). That applies to reviews just as
much as to writing the patches in the first place. So review what you
find interesting or what you think you can say something useful about.
regards, tom lane
