On 04/09/2012 11:12 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
It seems as though we need to have a "bad guy" that will say, "that sure isn't ready to COMMIT, so we'd better step back from imagining that it ought to be completed as part of this COMMITfest."
There's no reward for anyone in the PostgreSQL community to be a bad guy. If you're too aggressive about it, submitters get mad; too loose, and you get both committers and people worried about the release schedule mad. And the community is tight enough that the person you tick off today might be someone you have to work with next week.
Having sat in this particular seat several times now, I'd say the role needed here is more mediator than pointy-haired boss. When I write bad news e-mail to submitters, I try to make the tone more about clarifying what was learned and what is needed to improve things for a next round of submissions. It's not easy to adopt a writing tone for that sort of message while not coming off as insulting to someone.
Getting a feature punted forward is easier to take if a submitter leaves with a better roadmap and idea what standards they have to meet. On bigger features in particular, that sometimes requires feedback from a committer earlier in the process, even if they haven't reached "Ready for Committer" via a reviewer yet. My comment upthread about nailing down the committer for big features earlier than smaller ones was along these same lines.
I wonder if we're starting to have enough data to establish meaningful statistics on feedback.
I had Robert send me a dump of the data that's in the CF app the other day. I'm hoping to do some useful data mining on it before PGCon.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US g...@2ndquadrant.com Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
