Re: Feature freeze progress report

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Bruce, 
> 
> > > The bottom line is if you had a system that was 100% perfect in
> > > capturing all information about a patch, it only helps us 2% toward
> > > reviewing the patch, and what is the cost of keeping 100% information?
> >
> > 2% for you or Tom reviewing a recently discussed, run-of-the mill patch.
> > I suspect that %age will rise as the patch complexity increases and the
> > reviewers experience decreases - which is exactly the situation that it
> > would help to improve.
> 
> Moreover, what I'm looking for is tools which will:
> 1) allow existing reviewers to make better use of the time that they have, and
> 2) encourage/assist new reviewers in helping out, and
> 3) not bottleneck on the availability of a single project member
> 
> The current patch-queue process is failing to scale with the project: every 
> release it gets to be more work for you & Tom to integrate the patches.  We 
> need to think of new approaches to make the review process scale.  As a 
> pointed example, you're about to go on tour for 2 weeks and patch review will 
> stall while you're gone.  That's not sustainable.

I am traveling --- I left on Friday.  I am in Sydney now.

As far as scaling, patch information isn't our problem right now.  If
someone wants to help we can give them up-to-date information on exactly
how to deal with the patch.  It is people doing the work that is the
bottleneck.

> If you don't think that a web tool will help, then what *do* you think will 
> help?  Just "soldiering on" isn't really an answer, and I notice that you're 
> very quick to come up with reasons why anything we might try will fail, but 
> extremely reluctant to make suggestions for improvement.

Well, if I had something better, I would be doing it already.

There isn't an improved solution to every problem.

We have this discussion regularly --- things aren't going well, so there
must be a better way.  I know things aren't going well because I created
this thread, but I don't see collecting patch information as solving
this issue.  What we actually need are more people doing things,
"soldiering on".

As an example, how is patch information going to help us review HOT or
group-item-index?  There is frankly more information about these in the
archives than someone could reasonable read.  What someone needs is a
summary of where we are now on the patches, and lots of time.

FYI, Tom, Heikki, I need one of you to post the list of patches and
where we think we are on each one, even if the list is imperfect.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>          http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +