Re: 9.6 -> 10.0

On 10/05/16 00:46, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> The question is whether others take an interest in doing the same thing for
>> pglogical. I suggest that it is more about acceptance of the technology than
>> it is about software quality, which is easy to measure. Perhaps that is just
>> a matter of time.
>
> Hmm, I don't agree with that.

Please note that the discussion you are replying to is about pglogical
extension being ready for use with 9.6 release, not about in-core inclusion.

> Craig Ringer said on February 18th that
> "I'm not sure anyone takes the pglogical downstream submission as a
> serious attempt at inclusion in 9.6".  That was news to me; I had
> hoped very much that it was a serious attempt at inclusion in 9.6.

Well as of 18th February it was clear that it's going to be hard to push
it in core as the progress of polishing was slower than what was
necessary, both in terms of our development and the community review of
the more complex parts of the submission. But given the patch size and
the amount of other patches in the queue that's understandable. Craig's
comment should be taken in this context not in the context of original
submission as you seem to be doing.

> But when I read the patch it became clear pretty quickly that his
> statement was accurate.  The patch was not in a state where anyone
> could seriously think of committing it, and it had many problems which
> obviously could have been fixed prior to submission.  To take just one
> example, the documentation was in markdown, not SGML, but more than
> that, it would have needed a heavy rewriting to match the style of the
> PostgreSQL documentation.  It's not like Craig Ringer and Petr Jelinek
> don't know what PostgreSQL documentation needs to look like.
>

I am sorry but I don't really get this. We have had READMEs explaining
things before and we even have some in the core. Yes there should
eventually be sgml docs but IMHO we haven't been in the phase where it
was clear what should be there and converting relevant parts is just
matter of some manual work. I thought that time is better spent on
discussing and improving the actual architecture/design as that's what
takes time and thinking, not converting docs into format which is harder
to edit. I don't think that not being sgml prevented anybody from
reading it and commenting on it.

> On top of that, when various people provided review comments, they
> never resulted in an updated patch.  The original post was December
> 31st.  By January 10th, it had been reviewed by two people.  By
> January 17th, they'd both asked for an updated patch to be posted with
> a fix for a bug that had been uncovered in review.  More than three
> months later, there's still no new patch on that thread.

Yeah, sadly I didn't get to it in timely manner and by the time I did
get to it, it seemed like it's too late for 9.6. So I only sent URL to
git repo with fixes into the thread for anybody interested in reviewing
and moved on to help getting other people's patches in as that seemed
like more productive thing to do for 9.6 at that point. Since then, more
fundamental questions (like tighter integration into core as opposed to
contrib) appeared which make the above seem like a good decision (but it
also means no patch in the thread).

> That means somebody's got to submit something that
> looks like a committable patch and be prepared to do several rounds of
> timely revision of that patch as review comments arrive.  Andres is
> willing to review such a patch and I am, too.
>

That's good to hear.

--
   Petr Jelinek                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
   PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services