Prev: [HACKERS] knngist patch support
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From: tomas on 11 Feb 2010 00:31
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On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 04:49:59PM -0800, Ragi Y. Burhum wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I noticed this morning that the k nearest neighbor gist patch
> https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/patch_view?id=230 was still being
> considered for inclusion in 9. Sadly, this feature appears to have been
> dropped from 9.

This has been discussed recently on this list. Seems the patch would
need more review to be considered stable. So it's the hard choice of
letting the schedule for 9.0 slip or not letting this patch in.

But some prerequisites will go in, that's the good news.

(BTW: I tried to find this discussion in the Web archives, but had no
luck. It's in my mailbox, though --

e.g.

message-ID 603c8f071002070527j1dada7cdseb42e7cbc71bf71a(a)mail.gmail.com

part of the long thread "Damage control mode", starting on Jan 8, 2010;
this one mail is from Feb 7 -- but that might be me)

Regards
- -- tomás
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From: Tom Lane on 11 Feb 2010 01:49
Oleg Bartunov <oleg(a)sai.msu.su> writes:
> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch.

There was a scheduling problem all right, which was that this patch *did
not make* the deadline for the November CF. The fact that it got any
review at all in November was more than expected under the CF process.
And I remind you that we stated more than once that we didn't want major
feature patches to show up only at the last CF. If it had come from
anyone other than you and Teodor, there would have not been even a
moment's consideration of letting it into 9.0.

My own feeling about it is that I much preferred the original proposal
of a contrib module with little or no change to core code. I don't want
to be changing core code for this at this late hour. If it were only
touching GIST I'd be willing to rely on your and Teodor's expertise in
that module, but it's not. It whacks around the planner, it makes
questionable changes in the operator class structure, and the last
version I saw hadn't any documentation whatever. It's not committable
on documentation grounds alone, even if everybody was satisfied about
the code.

How do you feel about going back to the original contrib module for now
and resubmitting the builtin version for 9.1?

regards, tom lane

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From: Robert Haas on 11 Feb 2010 02:28
2010/2/11 Oleg Bartunov <oleg(a)sai.msu.su>:
> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch. People with

So... I think the reason why there was no movement between November
25th and January 15th is because no CommitFest started between
November 25th and January 15th. Had you submitted the patch on
November 14th, you would have gotten a lot more feedback in November;
I agree that we don't have a lot of formal documentation about the
CommitFest process, but I would think that much would be pretty clear,
but maybe not. The reason there was no movement after January 15th is
because (1) I couldn't get anyone to volunteer to review it, except
Mark Cave-Ayland who didn't actually do so (or anyway didn't post
anything publicly), and (2) we were still working on rbtree.

Personally, I am a little irritated about the whole way this situation
has unfolded. I devoted a substantial amount of time over my
Christmas vacation to patch review, and many of those patches went on
to be committed. Some of the patches I reviewed were yours. I did
not get paid one dime for any of that work. I expressed candidly,
from the very beginning, that getting such a large patch done by the
end of this CommitFest would likely be difficult, especially given
that it had two precursor patches. In exchange for giving you my
honest opinions about your patches two weeks before the scheduled
start of the CommitFest, over my Christmas vacation, and for free, I
got a long stream of complaints from you and others about how the
process is unfair, and as nearly zero help making the prerequisite
patches committable as it is possible for anyone to achieve. It
regularly took 4-6 days for a new version of the patch to appear, and
as often as not questions in my reviews were ignored for days, if not
weeks. It took a LOT of iterations before my performance concerns
were addressed; and I believe that process could have been done MUCH
more quickly.

Now, it is possible that as you are sitting there reading this email,
you are thinking to yourself "well, your feedback didn't actually make
that patch any better, so this whole thing is just pure
obstructionism." I don't believe that's the case, but obviously I'm
biased and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. What I can tell
you for sure is that all of my reviewing was done with the best of
motivations and in a sincere attempt to do the right thing.

You may be right that January 15th was a bad time to start a
CommitFest, although it's very unclear to me why that might be. At
least in the US, the holidays are over long before January 15th, but
we had a very small crop of reviewers this time around, and a number
of them failed to review the patches they picked up, or did only a
very cursory review. It might be mentioned that if you have concerns
about getting your own patches reviewed, you might want to think about
reviewing some patches by other people. Of the 60 patches currently
in the 2010-01 CommitFest, I'm listed as a reviewer on 12 of them.
Needless to say, if someone else had volunteered to do some or all of
the review work on some of those patches, I would have had more time
to work on other patches.

....Robert

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From: "Ragi Y. Burhum" on 11 Feb 2010 02:45
I have to say that as a 3rd party observer it is quite obvious to
understand why the PostgreSQL software is so good - people are very
passionate about the work they are doing. However, in this instance,
as a by-stander, it seems that there is a lot of energy being spent on
pointing fingers. At the end, the only people that loose are users
like me who would love to have a feature like this since it would
literally make one of the most common types of spatial queries, for
lack of better wording, ridiculously fast. I sincerely apologize if I
triggered any kind of trouble by asking a questions about this
feature.

- Ragi


On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/2/11 Oleg Bartunov <oleg(a)sai.msu.su>:
>> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
>> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
>> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
>> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch. People with
>
> So...  I think the reason why there was no movement between November
> 25th and January 15th is because no CommitFest started between
> November 25th and January 15th.  Had you submitted the patch on
> November 14th, you would have gotten a lot more feedback in November;
> I agree that we don't have a lot of formal documentation about the
> CommitFest process, but I would think that much would be pretty clear,
> but maybe not.  The reason there was no movement after January 15th is
> because (1) I couldn't get anyone to volunteer to review it, except
> Mark Cave-Ayland who didn't actually do so (or anyway didn't post
> anything publicly), and (2) we were still working on rbtree.
>
> Personally, I am a little irritated about the whole way this situation
> has unfolded.  I devoted a substantial amount of time over my
> Christmas vacation to patch review, and many of those patches went on
> to be committed.  Some of the patches I reviewed were yours.  I did
> not get paid one dime for any of that work.  I expressed candidly,
> from the very beginning, that getting such a large patch done by the
> end of this CommitFest would likely be difficult, especially given
> that it had two precursor patches.  In exchange for giving you my
> honest opinions about your patches two weeks before the scheduled
> start of the CommitFest, over my Christmas vacation, and for free, I
> got a long stream of complaints from you and others about how the
> process is unfair, and as nearly zero help making the prerequisite
> patches committable as it is possible for anyone to achieve.  It
> regularly took 4-6 days for a new version of the patch to appear, and
> as often as not questions in my reviews were ignored for days, if not
> weeks.  It took a LOT of iterations before my performance concerns
> were addressed; and I believe that process could have been done MUCH
> more quickly.
>
> Now, it is possible that as you are sitting there reading this email,
> you are thinking to yourself "well, your feedback didn't actually make
> that patch any better, so this whole thing is just pure
> obstructionism."  I don't believe that's the case, but obviously I'm
> biased and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  What I can tell
> you for sure is that all of my reviewing was done with the best of
> motivations and in a sincere attempt to do the right thing.
>
> You may be right that January 15th was a bad time to start a
> CommitFest, although it's very unclear to me why that might be.  At
> least in the US, the holidays are over long before January 15th, but
> we had a very small crop of reviewers this time around, and a number
> of them failed to review the patches they picked up, or did only a
> very cursory review.  It might be mentioned that if you have concerns
> about getting your own patches reviewed, you might want to think about
> reviewing some patches by other people.  Of the 60 patches currently
> in the 2010-01 CommitFest, I'm listed as a reviewer on 12 of them.
> Needless to say, if someone else had volunteered to do some or all of
> the review work on some of those patches, I would have had more time
> to work on other patches.
>
> ...Robert
>

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From: Robert Haas on 11 Feb 2010 08:01
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 3:38 AM, Oleg Bartunov <oleg(a)sai.msu.su> wrote:
> Robert, please accept my public apology, if you feel I offense you. There
> are
> nothing against you. Your contribution is very important and I really don't
> understand why on the Earth you're not paid ! I remember discussion to paid
> you from our foundation.  That's shame. Does nybody ever got support for
> development from our foundation ?

No, I don't feel like you offended me. It's more that, from my point
of view, it seems like all the things you're complaining about are
things that you more or less have control over, or at least could have
foreseen. I have only been involved in this project for a year and a
half, so the CommitFest process is the only process that I know or
understand. On the whole, I've found it to be a pretty good process.
I get my patches in; I help other people get their patches in (and
hopefully improve them along the way). It's particularly appealing
when you're a non-committer, as it gives you a formal structure to
make sure your work gets looked at.

It seems that you're sort of frustrated with the system and the need
to go through a process before committing a patch; and that you feel
that the rules are unclear. I don't think it's a bad thing to go
through a process before committing a patch, especially a large patch
like knngist, but of course that's just my opinion. I agree that the
fact that the rules are unclear is a problem, though I'm not sure what
to do about it. I am not sure they are so unclear as you are making
them out to be, but again, I'm biased by being a relative newcomer, as
well as someone who has been in the middle of many of the process
discussions.

> Robert, human resources are the main problem and, first of all,
> our system should work for developers ! If we will not understand each other
> and follow only some unclear rules, we'll lost current developers and will
> not attract new. We, probably, in our particulary case, will follow our
> original suggestion -just contrib module, but I concern about future. Now I
> have to think not just about algorithms and implementation, but about
> reviewer and current regulation.

IMHO, our system has to work for both developers and users, and it has
to work for both committers and non-committers.

....Robert

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