Re: Non-committer reviews: is it helpful?

30.01.2026 02:44, Tom Lane пишет:
> Alexander Borisov <lex.borisov@gmail.com> writes:
>> I have a question for the community. While waiting for feedback on my
>> own patches, I was wondering: is there value in me reviewing other
>> people's patches, even though I am not a committer here?
>
> Yes, absolutely.  Even if you don't catch every problem that a
> person with committer-level experience might catch, every problem
> you do catch is one less thing for the eventual committer to deal
> with.
>
> Another reason why we encourage people of all experience levels
> to do code reviews is that that is amazingly useful for gaining
> familiarity with the Postgres code base, which is important for
> becoming a more senior-level contributor.  Committers don't appear
> out of nowhere; they gained the necessary knowledge by working on
> patches, both their own and others'.
>
>> I’ve been around here for over a year, and sometimes it feels like the
>> project lacks a dedicated coordinator to direct contributor and reviewer
>> efforts. Because of this, I'm not always sure which patches deserve
>> attention first.
>
> You presume a degree of top-down organization that doesn't exist
> around here.  People work on whatever catches their fancy (or,
> perhaps, what their company wants them to work on ... but that is no
> business of the community at large).  That applies to reviews just as
> much as to writing the patches in the first place.  So review what you
> find interesting or what you think you can say something useful about.


Thank you for your reply, it makes the community's approach clearer.
Therefore, I can confidently review patches in the mailing list and
offer my own options/edits.
With confidence that this is really useful for the community, and the
committers.

--
Regards,
Alexander Borisov