Feedback-ID: ia2694551:Fastmail
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2023 21:26:42 +0100
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu>
Cc: "Gregory Stark (as CFM)" <stark.cfm@gmail.com>,
	Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>,
	PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Commitfest 2023-03 starting tomorrow!
Message-ID: <20230318202642.uzfkystsyqevn6fl@alvherre.pgsql>
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On 2023-Mar-17, Greg Stark wrote:

> I'm going to go ahead and do this today. Any of these patches that are
> "Waiting on Author" and haven't received any emails or status changes
> since March 1 I'm going to move out of the commitfest(*).

So I've come around to thinking that booting patches out of commitfest
is not really such a great idea.  It turns out that the number of active
patch submitters seems to have reached a peak during the Postgres 12
timeframe, and has been steadily decreasing since then; and I think
this is partly due to frustration caused by our patch process.

It turns out that we expect that contributors will keep the patches the
submit up to date, rebasing over and over for months on end, with no
actual review occurring, and if this rebasing activity stops for a few
weeks, we boot these patches out.  This is demotivating: people went
great lengths to introduce themselves to our admittedly antiquated
process (no pull requests, remember), we gave them no feedback, and then
we reject their patches with no further effort?  I think this is not
good.

At this point, I'm going to suggest that reviewers should be open to the
idea of applying a submitted patch to some older Git commit in order to
review it.  If we have given feedback, then it's OK to put a patch as
"waiting on author" and eventually boot it; but if we have not given
feedback, and there is no reason to think that the merge conflicts some
how make the patch fundamentally obsolete, then we should *not* set it
Waiting on Author.  After all, it is quite easy to "git checkout" a
slightly older tree to get the patch to apply cleanly and review it
there.

Authors should, of course, be encouraged to keep patches conflict-free,
but this should not be a hard requirement.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/