On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 10:41 AM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > > It's currently possible for VACUUM to set the all-frozen bit while > > unsetting the all-visible bit, due to a race condition [1]. This is > > your long standing bug. So apparently nobody is qualified to commit > > patches in this area. > > That's a non-sequitur. Bugs are a fact of programming.
I agree. > > About a year ago, there was a massive argument over some earlier work > > in the same general area, by me. Being the subject of a pile-on on > > this mailing list is something that I find deeply upsetting and > > demoralizing. I just cannot take much more of it. At the same time, > > I've made quite an investment in the pending patches, and think that > > it's something that I have to see through. > > I'm, genuinely!, sorry that you feel piled on. That wasn't, and isn't, my > goal. Apology accepted. I am making a simple, practical point here, too: I'm much too selfish a person to continue to put myself in this position. I have nothing to prove, and have little to gain over what I'd get out of working in various other areas. I wasn't hired by my current employer to work on VACUUM in particular. In the recent past I have found ways to be very productive in other areas, without any apparent risk of protracted, stressful fights -- which is something that I plan on getting back to soon. I just don't have the stomach for this. It just isn't worth it to me. > I think the area of code desperately needs work. I complained because I > didn't like the process and was afraid of the consequences and the perceived > need on my part to do post-commit reviews. The work that I did in 15 (in particular commit 0b018fab, the "oldest extant XID" commit) really isn't very useful without the other patches in place -- it was always supposed to be one piece of a larger whole. It enables the freezing stuff because VACUUM now "gets credit" for proactive freezing in a way that it didn't before. The motivating examples wiki page shows examples of this [1]. Once the later patches are in place, the 15/16 work on VACUUM will be complete, and I can walk away from working on VACUUM having delivered a very useful improvement to performance stability -- a good outcome for everybody. If you and Robert can find a way to accommodate that, then in all likelihood we won't need to have any more heated and protracted arguments like the one from early in 2022. I will be quite happy to get back to working on B-Tree, likely the skip scan work. [1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Freezing/skipping_strategies_patch:_motivating_examples -- Peter Geoghegan
