On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 1:50 PM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > Bruce, just about everyone seems to disagree with your current approach. And > not just this year, this has been a discussion in most if not all release note > threads of the last few years.
+1. > People, including me, *have* addressed your criteria, but you just waved those > concerns away. It's hard to continue discussing criteria when it doesn't at > all feel like a conversation. At one point on this thread, Bruce said "I am particularly critical if I start to wonder, "Why does the author _think_ I should care about this?" because it feels like the author is writing for him/herself and not the audience." Whenever this sort of thing has come up in the past, and I pushed back, Bruce seemed to respond along these lines: he seemed to suggest that there was some kind of conflict of interests involved. This isn't completely unreasonable, of course -- my motivations aren't wholly irrelevant. But for the most part they're *not* very relevant, and wouldn't be even if Bruce's worst suspicions were actually true. In principle it shouldn't matter that I'm biased, if I happen to be correct in some relevant sense. Everybody has some kind of bias. Even if my bias in these matters was a significant factor (which I tend to doubt), I don't think that it's fair to suggest that it's self-serving or careerist. My bias was probably present before I even began work on the feature in question. I tend to work on things because I believe that they're important -- it's not the other way around (at least not to a significant degree). > In the end, these are patches to the source code, I don't think you can just > wave away widespread disagreement with your changes. That's not how we do > postgres development. In lots of cases (a large minority of cases) the problem isn't even really with the emphasis of one type of item over another/the inclusion or non-inclusion of some individual item. It's actually a problem with the information being presented in the most useful way. Often I've suggested what I believe to be a better wording on the merits (usually less obscure and more accessible language), only to be met with the same sort of resistance from Bruce. If I've put a huge amount of work into the item (as is usually the case), then I think that I am at least entitled to a fair hearing. I don't expect Bruce to meet me halfway, or even for him to meet me a quarter of the way -- somebody has to be empowered to say no here (even to very senior community members). I just don't think that he has seriously considered my feedback in this area over the years. Not always, not consistently, but often enough for it to seem like a real problem. -- Peter Geoghegan
