Re: next CommitFest

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
>> Requiring people to write docs or any other patch submission rules has
>> never been counterproductive. People could easily say, "English is not
>> my first language, therefore I skip all comments and docs". But they
>> don't, because we require that, as a hard rule. Nobody has ever said
>> enforcing *those* rules is counter productive.
>
> Requiring that someone document their own work is very different from
> requiring that they spend time reviewing someone elses entirely
> unrelated work, possibly in areas of which they have little or no
> understanding (which may well be an issue at times).

I think this is overstating the level of contribution that is being
asked, at least by me.  Every CommitFest is full of a bunch of little
patches that make small changes and need to be reviewed.  Anyone who
is reasonably familiar with C (and most of our regular contributors
are) can take a little time to understand what one of those patches is
doing and check it for style and functionality.  I can usually review
one of those patches in about 2 hours knowing nothing about that area
of the system.

What I object to about the present system is that the last two
CommitFests have gone like this, for me:

1. First, I assign reviewers to as many patches as we have reviewers for.
2. Then, I ask the reviewers who haven't done so to actually complete
the reviews.
3. Then, I ask the patch submitters who haven't done so to update
their patches, and/or bounce the patches for lack of an update.
4. Then, I ask the reviewers who don't do it without prompting to
check over the revised patches.
...at this point we are about 2 weeks into the CommitFest...
5. Then, I try to find reviewers for the patches that haven't been
reviewed yet and start steps 1-4 over with the remaining patches.
6. Concurrently, I review several patches myself.

Step #5 is the one that is really irritating to me.  If there are 45
patches in the CommitFest and 15 to 20 people who didn't submit
anything sign up to review and the committers take 7 or 8 patches
directly, why is the number of reviewers still 10 or 15 less than the
number of patches?  My diagnosis is that the people who submit 2 or 3
or 4 or 5 patches to the CommitFest think to themselves "well, if I
sign up to review, I might not have time to update all of these
patches and get them committed during this CommitFest, so I'll let
someone else do it".  As far as I can see, this is the exact opposite
of how the process is supposed to work: during the CommitFest, people
are supposed to stop working on their own patches and review patches
belonging to other people.  As it is, the people who are actually
willing to review are getting asked to review multiple patches so that
other people can review none at all.  Some people are willing to do
that, and that is fine, but many are not, and even for the ones who
are, after a certain point, it seems unfair to ask it.

To put this another way, if everyone who submitted a patch reviewed a
patch, we could finish up each CommitFest in 2-3 weeks instead of a
whole month, except that the committing would drag out for the rest of
the month unless someone other than Tom is willing to help to a
greater degree than in the most recent CommitFest.  That would
substantially increase the time available for everyone to work on
their own patches.

...Robert