Greg,
> It's more than the available experienced reviewers are willing to chew
> on fully as volunteers. The reward for spending review time is pretty
> low right now.
Short of paying for review time, I don't think we have another solution
for getting the "big patches" reviewed, except to rely on the major
contributors who are paid full-time to hack Postgres. You know as well
as me that, as consultants, we can get clients to pay for 10% extra time
for review in the course of developing a feature, but the kind of time
which patches like Row Security, Changesets, or other "big patches" need
nobody is going to pay for on a contract basis. And nobody who is doing
this in their "spare time" has that kind of block.
So I don't think there's any good solution for the "big patches".
I do think our project could do much more to recruit reviewers for the
small-medium patches, to take workload off the core contributors in
general. Historically, however, this project (and the contributors on
this list) has made material decisions not to encourage or recruit new
people as reviewers, and has repeatedly stated that reviewers are not
important. Until that changes, we are not going to get more reviewers
(and I'm not going to have much sympathy for existing contributors who
say they have no time for review).
If we want more reviewers and people spending more time on review, then
we need to give reviewers the *same* respect and the *same* rewards that
feature contributors get. Not something else, the exact same.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com