I didn't really get any feedback on my proposal to add a new "Discussing review" state to help out the reviewers and CF manager. To show how adding it helps track the common flow of patches through the system, I turned the whole CF into a big state machine and marked how the transitions should normally happen at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Running_a_CommitFest

If you carefully read the "Followup" section, which Robert wrote initially, you can see it implies such a state exists via the "Bogged down in discussion" comments. I'd just like to have a way to flag patches that are entering discussion because the reviewer isn't sure what happens next as such directly, to make this whole process more mechanical, fair, and predictable to the bulk of the participants (reviewers and authors). I wasn't able to figure out how to do that without adding this additional state to the system.

Robert's main objection to this idea, that at any point there should be one obvious person with the next action to take and authors should take more responsibility for their patch, is a good ideal. But since the CF manager ends up being the backstop for breakdowns in the process, they're always a second possible source for transitions. I'd rather them be a more predictable such source for a number of reasons.

Note that a major secondary goal here is to make it easier to bring on-board new CF managers and have them hit the ground running, by having near deterministic suggestions for much of what they need to do. It's also not a coincidence that some of the more boring parts of that job step toward being specified well enough that one might start automating them too. How to construct a simple "nag bot" that mails pgsql-rrreviewers to perform most of the CF actions listed here is pretty obvious working from this table.

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


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