Tom Lane wrote:
While I'm not against promoting more committers to deal with the influx of 
patches,
the only way I know for people to get to the skill level of being fully
competent reviewers is to have done a lot of patch writing themselves.
The dynamic going on right now is that many people who might otherwise be writing their own patches are instead doing patch review to try and keep the project as a whole moving forward. I actually had two off-list discussions about that just today, that topic pops up pretty regularly as I talk with contributors at all levels.

Since most people have an upper limit on how much community time they can spend, every minute spent reviewing is one you're not working on your own patches during. The way you're describing the qualification process, it would be easy to conclude that there's a reviewer ladder, and a developer ladder, and only climbing the latter leads to being a committer--that no matter how much review you do, it doesn't really count as a committer grade skill.

I'm not sure that's the message you want to be sending, because anyone who dreams of being a committer is going to stay as far away from doing review as they can if that notion spreads. Based on the growing frustration with "doing review doesn't leave me with time for my own patches" I keep hearing, that perception is already something to be wary of. If the primary criteria is generating patches that apply with minimal changes, you could make a case that someone who's gotten skilled enough as a reviewer to only pass through patches of that quality should get some recognition even if they didn't write them. That's clearly a useful subset of the skills needed to commit patches only if they look to be ready for it.

--
Greg Smith    2ndQuadrant   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
g...@2ndquadrant.com  www.2ndQuadrant.com


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