Subject: Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose

From: Tomas Vondra <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2024 23:23:24 +0200

On 5/24/24 22:44, Tom Lane wrote:
> Joe Conway <[email-masked]> writes:
>> On 5/24/24 15:45, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I was *not* proposing doing a regular review, unless of course
>>> somebody really wants to do that.  What I am thinking about is
>>> suggesting how to make progress on patches that are stuck, or in some
>>> cases delivering the bad news that this patch seems unlikely to ever
>>> get accepted and it's time to cut our losses.  (Patches that seem to
>>> be moving along in good order probably don't need any attention in
>>> this process, beyond determining that that's the case.)  That's why
>>> I think we need some senior people doing this, as their opinions are
>>> more likely to be taken seriously.
> 
>> Maybe do a FOSDEM-style dev meeting with triage review at PG.EU would at 
>> least move us forward? Granted it is less early and perhaps less often 
>> than the thread seems to indicate, but has been tossed around before and 
>> seems doable.
> 
> Perhaps.  The throughput of an N-person meeting is (at least) a factor
> of N less than the same N people looking at patches individually.
> On the other hand, the consensus of a meeting is more likely to be
> taken seriously than a single person's opinion, senior or not.
> So it could work, but I think we'd need some prefiltering so that
> the meeting only spends time on those patches already identified as
> needing help.
> 

I personally don't think the FOSDEM triage is a very productive use of
our time - we go through patches top to bottom, often with little idea
what the current state of the patch is. We always ran out of time after
looking at maybe 1/10 of the list.

Having an in-person discussion about patches would be good, but I think
we should split the meeting into much smaller groups for that, each
looking at a different subset. And maybe it should be determined in
advance, so that people can look at those patches in advance ...

-- 
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

---

From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2024 17:38:16 -0400

> advance, so that people can look at those patches in advance ...

Yeah, subgroups of 3 or 4 people sounds about right.  And definitely
some advance looking to see which patches need discussion.

			regards, tom lane