Re: Last gasp

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Geoghegan <peter@2ndquadrant.com>, Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov>, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2012-04-10T16:44:57Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> ...  It's surprisingly easy to hoodwink even
> experienced contributors into thinking that your patch is really,
> really almost done, honest, it just needs a couple more tweaks when in
> fact it's nowhere close.  I try not to attribute to bad faith what can
> be explained by incurable optimism, so maybe we just have a lot of
> incurable optimism.  But it's doing nobody any good.

The first, and possibly most significant, observation in Brooks' classic
_The Mythical Man-Month_ is: "All programmers are optimists."  I don't
think you're going to get rid of the incurable-optimism problem.
Rather, we'd better design around it.

			regards, tom lane