On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> There's no reward for anyone in the PostgreSQL community to be a bad guy.
> If you're too aggressive about it, submitters get mad; too loose, and you
> get both committers and people worried about the release schedule mad. And
> the community is tight enough that the person you tick off today might be
> someone you have to work with next week.
Yep.
> Having sat in this particular seat several times now, I'd say the role
> needed here is more mediator than pointy-haired boss. When I write bad news
> e-mail to submitters, I try to make the tone more about clarifying what was
> learned and what is needed to improve things for a next round of
> submissions. It's not easy to adopt a writing tone for that sort of message
> while not coming off as insulting to someone.
Agreed. I used to be better at this, but the increasing volume of
patches that get reviewed by no one else has forced me to curtail the
amount of time I spend on each one, and that is causing my natural
bluntness to come to the fore. Unfortunately.
I also think that people were more receptive to my reviews before I
got a commit bit. Back then, I was the guy who was telling you what
you were going to have to fix so Tom didn't boot your patch. Now, I'm
the guy who is threatening to boot your patch if you don't fix what I
want fixed. It comes off differently, even if the content is
identical.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company