On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pe...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > I think that you may be missing the greater point here. The people > that do this are kind of like the defectors in prisoner's dilemma - at > a certain point, some people cannot resist the temptation to push > their own patch forward at the expense of others ...
The question is - what exactly are we supposed to do about that? I think that when prisoner A rats out prisoner B and prisoner B spends 10 years in Leavenworth, prisoner B is unlikely to be very happy with the situation, even though he's surely not confused about *why* prisoner A did it. So here. If we accept your argument that some people simply cannot help themselves, then the only solution is to make it cease to be a prisoner's dilemma, and that can only be done by changing the incentives, which presumably means handing down punishments to people who push their own patches forward at the expense of others. Unless we care to choose a benevolent dictator, I don't see any way to accomplish that. It's feasible to think that we might be able to streamline the process of booting patches that are not close to committable at the start of a CommitFest, and especially at the start of the final CommitFest. For example, limiting patches to a small number of days in the "Waiting on Author" state would help a great deal. But the more general problem of people arguing that *their* patch is the special one without which the earth will cease to revolve about its axis is more difficult to solve, or that it's ready when it's really not, is more difficult to solve. How would you propose we deal with that problem? > ISTM that this is symptomatic of the wider problem of a dire shortage > of committer resources. 100% of my non-doc patches so far have been > committed by 3 people. I would really like to see us figure out a way > of making more hackers committers, perhaps subject to certain > conditions that don't currently exist for committers. You might find > that given commit bits, some people will take their responsibilities > as a reviewer far more seriously. Maybe you don't think that any of > the likely candidates are quite ready for that responsibility, but you > must admit that it's a serious problem. I don't agree with that. I think that there are a few people who don't now have commit bits who should be given them - in particular, Fujii Masao and Kevin Grittner, both of whom have been doing consistently excellent work for several years. But giving people a commit bit in the hopes that they will do better reviews seems completely backwards to me: we should instead give commit bits to people who have *already* demonstrated that they can be trusted to do good reviews and exercise good judgement, and no one else. The fact is that we have no shortage of committers - there are 19 people who have access to push code into our master git repository. A handful of those people have basically completely left the project and their commit rights should probably be revoked on that basis; most of them are still involved in one way or another but just not able to devote a lot of time to reviewing other people's code. The problem is even more acute for large patches, which only a handful of people are qualified to review, and which also take a lot of wall clock time to review thoroughly. But that's not a problem that's going to go away because we make more committers. Giving more people the ability to commit stuff will neither force them to devote time to it nor make them qualified to do it if they aren't already. Every time someone's favorite patch gets rejected, there is an outcry of - the standards for commit are too high! But this overlooks the fact that there are some people who regularly meet them. A patch from Fujii Masao, Kevin, or Noah is about ten times more likely to be applied without comment than one from the average submitter. That's not because I like them (although I have to admit to liking Kevin quite a lot; I have met Fujii Masao at most briefly and Noah not at all), or because I necessarily care about their patches more than anyone else's; it's because they do really good work. Over time, such people tend to become committers, and then everyone complains that the committers have high standards. Well, yes. They are committers *because* they have high standards, and that is exactly as it should be. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
