Horton

Thread

  1. Assisting developers

    Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2004-07-13T14:02:10Z

    One failing that has appeared during the 7.5 development cycle is that
we as a community haven't been able to provide timely feedback to
developers working on large feature additions.

I am particularly thinking of Alvaro (nested transactions) and Simon
(PITR), where we haven't been able to give them sufficient feedback to
make them fully productive.

I am not sure what can be done to solve this in the future.  There are
only a limited number of us who have the experience and time to review
and comment on very complex patches.

Hopefully this is just growing pains and the community will grow to the
point where we can have more people focused on assisting developers
adding complex features.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

  2. Re: Assisting developers

    Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2004-07-13T14:28:18Z

    > One failing that has appeared during the 7.5 development cycle is that
> we as a community haven't been able to provide timely feedback to
> developers working on large feature additions.
> 
> I am particularly thinking of Alvaro (nested transactions) and Simon
> (PITR), where we haven't been able to give them sufficient feedback to
> make them fully productive.
> 
> I am not sure what can be done to solve this in the future.  There are
> only a limited number of us who have the experience and time to review
> and comment on very complex patches.
> 
> Hopefully this is just growing pains and the community will grow to the
> point where we can have more people focused on assisting developers
> adding complex features.

Well, I note (and I'm not being unkind or anything here) that a lot of 
the high level committers we have haven't been so active this release. 
Peter and Joe haven't been around much and Jan has been busy with Slony. 
  We also lost Thomas Lockhart.  Neil's also away on holidays.  You and 
Tom have basically been doing all the reviewing - a great job - but I 
can't believe Tom hasn't cracked yet :P

I've been around for years, but I've never really gotten into the depths 
of things, so I'm not much use for checking complex patches, but I'm 
willing to review simpler stuff :)

Maybe you should promote a new committer?  (Not me!)

Chris

  3. Re: Assisting developers

    Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2004-07-13T14:57:09Z

    Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > One failing that has appeared during the 7.5 development cycle is that
> > we as a community haven't been able to provide timely feedback to
> > developers working on large feature additions.
> > 
> > I am particularly thinking of Alvaro (nested transactions) and Simon
> > (PITR), where we haven't been able to give them sufficient feedback to
> > make them fully productive.
> > 
> > I am not sure what can be done to solve this in the future.  There are
> > only a limited number of us who have the experience and time to review
> > and comment on very complex patches.
> > 
> > Hopefully this is just growing pains and the community will grow to the
> > point where we can have more people focused on assisting developers
> > adding complex features.
> 
> Well, I note (and I'm not being unkind or anything here) that a lot of 
> the high level committers we have haven't been so active this release. 
> Peter and Joe haven't been around much and Jan has been busy with Slony. 
>   We also lost Thomas Lockhart.  Neil's also away on holidays.  You and 
> Tom have basically been doing all the reviewing - a great job - but I 
> can't believe Tom hasn't cracked yet :P

Excellent analysis.

> I've been around for years, but I've never really gotten into the depths 
> of things, so I'm not much use for checking complex patches, but I'm 
> willing to review simpler stuff :)
> 
> Maybe you should promote a new committer?  (Not me!)

The committing isn't really the issue.  It is reviewing and giving
feedback to developers of complex features.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

  4. Re: Assisting developers

    Marko Karppinen <marko@karppinen.fi> — 2004-07-13T16:21:43Z

    On Jul 13, 2004, at 17:02, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> One failing that has appeared during the 7.5 development cycle is that
> we as a community haven't been able to provide timely feedback to
> developers working on large feature additions.
>
> I am particularly thinking of Alvaro (nested transactions) and Simon
> (PITR), where we haven't been able to give them sufficient feedback to
> make them fully productive.

I'm just a bystander here, but it seems to me that in-depth discussion
of a feature only starts when someone realizes that he must speak now
or the darn thing might get committed. In other words, the emphasis is
placed in preventing something half-baked getting included. And that's
perfectly natural because it is much easier and quicker than commenting
thoughtfully on every idea that someone might come up with.

But it of course means that the price of admission is a patch that
poses a real risk of getting committed.

 From a pure resource utilization perspective, I don't see a way around
this. There's not enough expertise of pgsql internals to go around. As
long as that's the case, there will always be a barrier to entry. But
a high-risk patch isn't the only thing that can get you over such
a barrier; the only thing to control the distribution of this scarce
resource.

Cash comes to mind as an alternative.

mk

  5. Re: Assisting developers

    Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> — 2004-07-13T16:29:51Z

    Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I am not sure what can be done to solve this in the future.  There
> are only a limited number of us who have the experience and time to
> review and comment on very complex patches.

The issue as I see it is not reviewing patches, but defining features.  
Someone sets out to develop "nested transactions", and three days after 
feature freeze we have the first large discussion about what nested 
transactions really are, what they are good for, and how they should 
work.  Maybe next time think more about the old requirements, design, 
implementation, testing cycle.  Of course people did post plans, status 
updates, etc., but maybe it wasn't enough, not clear enough, or 
something else.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

  6. Re: Assisting developers

    Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2004-07-13T17:20:00Z

    Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> The issue as I see it is not reviewing patches, but defining features.  
> Someone sets out to develop "nested transactions", and three days after 
> feature freeze we have the first large discussion about what nested 
> transactions really are, what they are good for, and how they should 
> work.

Bear in mind though that what we have here is a huge discussion about
something that represents much less than 1% of the work involved in the
feature.  The hard part of nested transactions (or savepoints or
whatever you care to call 'em) is the implementation support for
reverting the backend's state to an earlier point without going all the
way back to ground-zero-idle state.  Alvaro's naturally spent most of
his time on the implementation, because without that there is no point
in debating syntax.  And it was the state of the implementation, not the
API which was understood to be unfinished, that drove the decision about
whether this was ready to be included in 7.5.

If we end up backing this out of 7.5, it will be because the remaining
implementation work doesn't get done, not because we are unable to agree
on a syntax.  (In which connection I'm a bit disturbed that Alvaro seems
to be spending time arguing with people rather than continuing to work
on internals...)

			regards, tom lane

  7. Re: Assisting developers

    Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com> — 2004-07-14T04:11:05Z

    Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
>>Well, I note (and I'm not being unkind or anything here) that a lot of 
>>the high level committers we have haven't been so active this release. 
>>Peter and Joe haven't been around much and Jan has been busy with Slony. 

I think this is (in part at least) a reflection of the economy finally 
picking up. Last year this time I had one major project going on -- 
right now I'm juggling about a half dozen or so, any one of which could 
keep me busy full time. Add a couple of OSCON presentations to prepare, 
and several serial disasters/distractions at home (nothing life 
threatening, but all time consuming), and that leaves little-to-no time 
for recreational Postgres coding :(

> The committing isn't really the issue.  It is reviewing and giving
> feedback to developers of complex features.
> 

This is very true. But the fact that I have been able to commit what 
little I have done this release has at least off-loaded some work from 
you Bruce, hasn't it? I'm still green enough though that I'm not in a 
position to review anything too complex -- someone like Tom or Bruce 
would still need to follow up behind me, so it wouldn't really save them 
any time.

Joe

  8. Re: Assisting developers

    Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2004-07-14T04:41:15Z

    Joe Conway wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> >>Well, I note (and I'm not being unkind or anything here) that a lot of 
> >>the high level committers we have haven't been so active this release. 
> >>Peter and Joe haven't been around much and Jan has been busy with Slony. 
> 
> I think this is (in part at least) a reflection of the economy finally 
> picking up. Last year this time I had one major project going on -- 
> right now I'm juggling about a half dozen or so, any one of which could 
> keep me busy full time. Add a couple of OSCON presentations to prepare, 
> and several serial disasters/distractions at home (nothing life 
> threatening, but all time consuming), and that leaves little-to-no time 
> for recreational Postgres coding :(
> 
> > The committing isn't really the issue.  It is reviewing and giving
> > feedback to developers of complex features.
> > 
> 
> This is very true. But the fact that I have been able to commit what 
> little I have done this release has at least off-loaded some work from 
> you Bruce, hasn't it? I'm still green enough though that I'm not in a 
> position to review anything too complex -- someone like Tom or Bruce 
> would still need to follow up behind me, so it wouldn't really save them 
> any time.

Yes, others have stepped up to commit things while I was busy --- Neil
and Joe come to mind.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

  9. Re: Assisting developers

    Karel Zak <zakkr@zf.jcu.cz> — 2004-07-14T07:32:04Z

    On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 06:29:51PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I am not sure what can be done to solve this in the future.  There
> > are only a limited number of us who have the experience and time to
> > review and comment on very complex patches.
> 
> The issue as I see it is not reviewing patches, but defining features.  

 You're  right. The other  problem is  that about  some features  nobody
 wants to talk over, because a feature is out of main stream interest or
 almost  nobody really  understand  a problem. In  this  case all  start
 discussion if something is already done and they try use it.

    Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <zakkr@zf.jcu.cz>
 http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/