On Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 11:14 AM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > > But let's not make the mistake of saying "we're not going to move > > things automatically because we want to find out if the authors are > > still interested" and then getting really concerned when some stuff > > doesn't get moved. That's missing the whole point. > > +1. Having a significant fraction of patches drop off the radar > was the desired outcome, wasn't it?
Well, not if the authors really are still actively caring about them. But there's been a funny evolution of our thinking about CommitFests over the years. When I first started managing CommitFests, I evicted patches that the author didn't update -- following a review -- within four days. Not four business days - four calendar days. After all, it was a CommitFest -- it was supposed to be for patches that were ready to be committed. That policy was, I think, viewed by many as too draconian, and it probably was. But now we've gotten to a point where the one month gap between CommitFest N and CommitFest N+1 is thought to be so short that it might be unreasonable to expect a patch author to move their patch forward sometime during that time. And I think that's clearly going too far the other way. Perhaps even way, way too far the other way. I think it's completely fine if somebody has a patch that they update occasionally as they have and it putters along for a few years and it finally either gets committed or it doesn't. I one hundred percent support part-time developers having the opportunity to participate as and when their schedule permits and I think that is an important part of being a good and welcoming open source community. But there are also people who are working very hard and very actively to progress patches and staying on top of the CF status and any new review emails every day, and that is ALSO a great way to do development, and it's reasonable to treat those cases differently. I'm not sure exactly how we can best do that, but it makes my head hurt every time I find something in the CF where the patch author was like "well, I'll get back to this at some point" and then three CFs later it's still sitting there in "Needs Review" or something. Probably not moving things forward automatically is only one part of that problem -- we could very much use some better tooling for judging how active certain patches are and, if not so active, whether that's more a lack of reviewers or more author inactivity. But we're not doing ourselves any favors by working super-hard to keep everything that anybody might potentially care about in the same bucket as things that are actually active. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
