Re: [9.4 CF 1] The Commitfest Slacker List

On 7/3/13 7:25 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> The extrapolation of Josh's approach is that committers
> have to do work that the community wants to maintain their commit
> rights, but their commit rights are helping the community, so why would
> people care if you take them away --- you only hurt the community
> further by doing so.

The main problem with having inactive committers (which I don't intend 
to include the important subject matter committers, who I'll get into at 
the end here) is that they skew the public information about who commits 
in a counterproductive way.  People visit 
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers , sees that list of names, 
and then make conclusions based on its content.  And some of those 
conclusions are wrong because the data is inconsistent.  The standards 
listed are applied when new committers are promoted, but they are not 
applied symmetrically to remove ones who don't anymore.

The #1 obstacle to my getting more time to work on core PostgreSQL is 
that companies presume regular submitters who are also non-committers 
don't do a very good job.  If you are competent and have a consistent 
track record of contributions to an open source project, the project 
would make you a committer, right?  Conversely, if you've been 
contributing for a while but aren't a committer, the most likely 
explanation is that your work quality is poor.  That is a completely 
reasonable viewpoint based on how most open source projects work.  The 
really terrible part is that it means the longer you've been submitting 
patches, the *less* competent you're assumed to be.  When I tell people 
I've been submitting things since 2007 but am not a committer, the only 
logical explanation is that my submissions must suck very hard, right?
From that perspective, people who are listed as committers but don't 
actively do work for the project are causing me a serious problem.  When 
someone who rarely commits can obviously qualify, that *proves* the bar 
for PostgreSQL committers is actually very low to casual observers. 
That's the message the project is inadvertently sending by leaving 
committers on there if they stop working actively.

The main thing I'd like to see is having the committer list, and its 
associated guidelines, updated to reflect that there are subject matter 
experts committing too.  That would pull them out of any "what have you 
done for me lately?" computations, and possibly open up a way to get 
more of them usefully.  Here are the first two obvious labels like that:

Michael Meskes (meskes) - embedded SQL
Teodor Sigaev (teodor) - inverted indexes

When even Josh Berkus doesn't even know all of this information, it's 
clearly way too obscure to expect the rest of the world to figure it out.

It also boggles my mind that there isn't already an entry like this on 
there too:

Thom Browne - documentation

Each time Thom passes through yet another correction patch that is 
committed with no change, I find it downright bizarre that a community 
with such limited committer resources wastes their time with that 
gatekeeping.  The standards for nominating committers seem based on 
whether they can commit just about anything.  I think it's more 
important to consider whether people are trusted to keep commits within 
their known area(s) of expertise.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com