On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> I am tempted to say we should clamp down and go into damage control
>> mode sooner rather than later.
>
> The more I see of the HS patch, the more I think the same. But my
> proposal for "damage control mode" would be to immediately punt
> everything else to the next release and focus our energies exclusively
> on HS *and* SR. In terms of the "big picture" for the project, those
> are headline items, and everything else is just trivia that the average
> user won't even notice.
Hmm. There's something to what you say, but what about the people who
were expecting their patches to be reviewed and perhaps committed in
the forthcoming CommitFest. I proposed a schedule for this release
that involved only three CommitFests and it was rejected, so it seems
a bit unfair to pull the rug out from under people at the eleventh
hour. Will we lose developers if we do this?
One thing we can certainly do if we decide to still have the
CommitFest is try to shift more of the committing work from you to
other committers who are not involved in the HS/SR work; I can
volunteer myself. That would hopefully free you up to spend more time
on HS/SR. I can also try to handle more of the minor bug-fixes, like
the bit-substring bug. I couldn't have fixed that as quickly as you
did, but I could have fixed it, and your time is more valuable than
mine.
Unfortunately, there are some patches that I probably will not feel
confident to commit without your input - in particular, writeable
CTEs, listen/notify, more frame options in window functions - and I
venture to say there may not be too many other takers either. So
we're going to have to confront the question of whether it's fair to
make those people wait a year. Maybe that is the right decision and
maybe it's not, but I want to make sure we are thinking about our
developer community as well as our user community, because without
them we are dead.
...Robert