Josh Berkus: 9.4 Commitfest 1 Wrap-up

The first CommitFest of the 9.4 development cycle involved an unprecedented number of patch submissions.  As of today, 9.4CF1 is still open because of one patch which apparently only Tom Lane can commit.  However, everything else out of a brutal commitfest has been done, and it's 16 days after the CF was supposed to finish, so I think I can write the wrap-up now.

First, let's talk numbers: this CF started with 106 patches, peaked at 108 patches, and finished with 102 patches (6 were moved to September).  This is over 50% more patches than we've had for the first CommitFest of the annual development cycle and more patches than we've had in any single CF before. Last year, CF1 only involved 59 patches.  So if you are a committer and you feel exhausted, that's why.  Some graphs:

As you can see, this year is a jump forward in the number of patches being submitted to the first commitfest, and if it's representative of the rest of the year, we're all going to spend a lot more time reviewing patches.

Why so many patches?  Well, I can think of a few reasons:

• contributions from the staffs of SalesForce and Huawei
• beginning of 2ndQuadrant's work on streaming logical replication
• a bunch of regression test patches
• some new major contributors, including one from Google Summer of Code
• more people submitting WIP patches to get spec feedback

All of the above are unquestionably good things, and not anything we want to deter, so we need to find ways to shoulder the load.  On the other hand, I'm not going to pay much attention to anyone who tells me we're "making things difficult for submitters".

So what did we get out of all this patch activity?  Some highlight features:

• new pgbench options
• ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT
• improvements in compression of BLOBs and large rows
• a bunch more regression tests
• REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY
• create background workers at runtime
• FILTER option for aggregates
• Part 1 of streaming logical replication
• WITH ORDINALITY to supply "row numbers" for set-returning functions

All in all, 49 patches were committed (I'm expecting the remaining pending patch to make a round 50).  However, 46 were sent back and an additional 6 were moved to the September CommitFest, so we need to plan for that one to be busy too.

So, what are we going to do to handle more patches?  I have some thoughts on that in my next blog post ...