On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Kevin Grittner <kevin.gritt...@wicourts.gov> wrote: > Now, the other aspect to this whole discussion is that people often > have code they have developed for academic purposes or for their own > use which they want to offer to the community "FWIW", and I think we > sometimes miss an opportunity to take advantage of someone else's > work because of an assumption that they have some vested interest in > it's acceptance. The fact that someone doesn't care enough to try to > work with the community to get their patch accepted doesn't *always* > mean that we're better off for ignoring that patch. Maybe that's > true 90% of the time or better, but it seems to me that sometimes our > community is a bit provincial.
We are. On the other hand, cleaning up other people's not-ready-for-prime-time patches isn't free. If I spend 4 hours cleaning up a patch in preparation for a commit, then that's 4 hours I don't get to spend on my own work. And since I *already* spend 3 or 4 times as much energy on other people's work as I do on my own, I'm not willing to go much further in that direction; if anything, I think I'd like to roll it back a bit. On the other hand, I am emphatically in favor of other people who are not me being willing to do that kind of work; I think it benefits our whole community, much as the work of people who write their own patches or review or volunteer in any other way benefits our whole community. Because I commit approximately 10 patches per CommitFest, and review perhaps another 5-10 that I don't end up committing (either because they get rejected or because someone else commits them), the amount of time that I can afford to spend on each of those patches is limited. Generally, if I can't commit a normal-size patch in half an hour of looking at it, I send back a review and move on. For some patches that I particularly care about, I have on occasion invested as much as 2-3 days (most recently, a big chunk of my Christmas vacation) to get them beaten into shape for a commit. I'd be happy to devote more time per patch, but it ain't gonna happen as long as the number that I have to handle to get the CommitFest finished on time remains in the two-digit range. That having been said, the kind of fixing up that you're talking about *does* happen, when someone cares enough to make it happen. We have numerous examples in the archives where person A submits a patch, and person B reviews it and, in lieu of a review, posts an updated patch, sometimes when person A has meanwhile totally disappeared, or when they haven't completely disappeared but don't have time to work on it. This is actually quite commonplace; it just doesn't happen for every patch. It tends to happen only for the things someone is really excited about because, well, fixing up someone else's bad code is not one of life's great pleasures. It'd be nice if we had even more of it than we do, but this is an all-volunteer organization. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
