Robert Haas wrote: > Tom and Bruce do give way before a clear consensus, but on the other > hand I think Simon is right that there was never much chance of > getting anything committed here without Heikki's endorsement, which > was slow in coming by his own admission. (I'm not in any way saying > he was wrong to withhold his endorsement, just that he did.) > > I think it's undeniable that the voices of the committers carry > significantly more weight than those of others on this mailing list, > and especially that of Tom because of the sheer volume of what he > commits compared to anyone else. Having one of the committers say > that they don't like your patch doesn't completely kill its chances of > getting accepted, but it definitely turns it into an uphill battle. > On the other hand, if one of the committers takes a fancy to your > patch it will occasionally jump ahead of the queue and get reviewed or > committed before patches submitted much earlier. And more than one > committer got features into 8.4 that were not really done in time for > the 11/08 CommitFest, and likely would have been rejected if they'd > come from a non-committer. > > As a thought experiment, consider two patches, one of which has a +1 > from Tom Lane and a -1 from some other respected community member who > is not a committer, and the other of which has a +1 from the community > member and a -1 from Tom Lane. Which do you think is more likely to > get committed? I know what I'd pick. > > Now, in many cases, the fact that the committers speak with the > loudest voices is a good thing, because they are mostly very good > coders with lots of PostgreSQL experience and a proven track record of > not breaking the tree too often. But that doesn't make it any less > true.
The above comments by Robert are very perceptive, and there is certainly truth that committer-endorsed patches are applied quicker than others. My only additional comment is that over time, reliable patch submitters become committers, so hopefully things balance out over time. -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
