The release management team has determined the following: An open item "owner" is a person taking overall responsibility for the work required to close a particular PostgreSQL 10 open item. Tasks required to close an open item may include performing tests, persuading issue reporters to provide more information, writing patches, reviewing patches, committing patches, and providing status updates to the community. For many complex issues, it will be impractical for the owner to perform all work personally. For example, a cautious owner may decline to both write and commit a tricky patch. We encourage owners to petition other community members for aid. At all times, the owner retains full responsibility for achieving progress.
Release dates will be at risk if individual open items stay open for many weeks. If owners manage their items well, the RMT will have minimal involvement. So that the RMT can determine when to intervene, owners shall mail status updates to the issue thread. Each update shall state a date when the community will receive another update and what, if anything, is happening in the intervening time. Here are examples of status updates meeting that specification: I will start reviewing the proposed patch on {now() + $X days} and make it my top priority for $Y days after that. By the end of $Y days, I will either have committed some patch or mailed a review of the proposed patch. I will test hypotheses $A and $B in my spare moments over the next $X days, then report back about what comes next based on those findings. I will not work on this before October, so I need the RMT to own it however it sees fit. I can make time to review fixes or to revert the patch, but I will not do most of the fix development. $original_author, can you write the fix? Failing that, can anyone else? I will follow up in 72 hours based on the responses I get. I would like to continue owning this $simple_cosmetic_item, but I want to help with $scary_item first. I will send my plans for this item within five days of $scary_item being resolved by its owner. The RMT will treat the self-selected next update date as a deadline and anticipate another status update on or before that date. Also, the RMT may intervene when status updates seem not to be swiftly converging toward a fix _and_ the current owner has held the item for at least one week. Consuming more than two weeks in total will often attract RMT intervention. The default owner for an open item is the committer of the patch that caused the item. (If a PostgreSQL 10 commit made an old defect much easier to encounter, proceed as though the PostgreSQL 10 patch caused the problem.) We encourage committers acquiring ownership this way to reply to the open item thread acknowledging ownership and giving an initial status update. Lacking such a message, the RMT will mail a notification To: the owner and Cc: pgsql-hackers@. This notification will specify an initial status update within three calendar days. The RMT encourages the patch author, if different from the committer, to vigorously help the item owner by maximizing the testing, patch writing, and other resolution work you do yourself. This is an excellent way to demonstrate your active involvement in the community. Owners may transfer ownership to any other willing person. (Non-committers, before accepting transfers, consider that your success will depend crucially on your ability to recruit a volunteer committer.) The RMT is the item owner of last resort. The RMT implicitly owns items not yet attributed to a commit; in that capacity, it will often solicit volunteers to research the causative commit. When an owner proposes to transfer ownership to the RMT, the RMT will always accept. However, the RMT will usually resolve the item by reverting patches or by a similarly low-cost, risk-averse method. Summary: - Committers own their commits' open items by default. - The owner always has a status update due at a known future date. - Items taking longer than 1-2 weeks are a problem. -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers