On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 2:33 PM Tomas Vondra <tomas.von...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > FWIW, it was mentioned that "your only concurring vote came from someone > with whom you share an employer" which kind suggests opinions/votes from > people working for the same company are somehow less honest/valuable. I > find that annoying and even insulting, because it kinda hints the > company (or companies) are pushing people to respond differently than > they would otherwise. Which I find rather insulting.
It doesn't have to be companies exerting overt pressure on their employees. It's natural that people are going to have a sympathetic view of patches written by people with whom they work on a day-to-day basis. And it's not even a bad thing; having friends and colleagues whom we trust is good. Still, it's impossible to be be sure that you're reacting in exactly the same way to a patch by someone you know and trust as you would to a patch written by a stranger, which is why when Amit and I recently posted some reviews of zheap-related patches, we inserted disclaimers into the first paragraph that we are not independent of those patches and that independent review is desirable. We did that because *we know* that we may be biased and we want to be fair about that and on guard against it. I don't think asking other people to be similarly aware should be annoying or insulting. If your Mom decided to take up PostgreSQL hacking and posted a patch here, can you really say you'd evaluate that patch with the exact same objectivity that you'd apply to a patch written by somebody you'd never met before? Whether you have a good relationship with your Mom or a terrible one, that seems like an impossible standard for any normal human being to meet. With regard to this patch, I think the new behavior is fine in and of itself, but I *do not* think it should have been back-patched and I *do not* think it should work one way for tables and another for indexes. And, regardless of the technical merits, I strongly object to things to which multiple people are objecting being jammed into a back-branch just before a release wraps. That's just not cool. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
