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> Review in the PostgreSQL community does tend to be on the "harsh" side.

Can you share an example of a review that you consider harsh? (feel free to share privately, I'm simply interested in what you consider harsh)

I admit some of the reviews may be a bit more direct, particularly between senior hackers who know each other, and from time to time there are arguments. It's not just rainbows and unicorns all the time, but in general I find the discussion extremely civilized (particularly for submissions from new contributors). But maybe that's just survivor bias, and the experience is much worse for others ...

> I've only submitted one patch (\pset linestyle unicode for psql), and with a few rounds of review and revision it made it in. Overall I found this process nitpicky but productive. However, there is a point at which the harshly critical review can be detrimental, and from the other comments mentioned here, it sounds like this has been the case in the past.

Oh, 2009 - good old days ;-) Thanks for the patch, BTW.

There's a fine line between nitpicking and attention to detail. We do want to accept patches, but OTOH we don't want to make the code worse (not just by introducing bugs, even code style matters too). At some point the committer may decide the patch is in "good enough" shape and polish it before the commit, but most of that should happen during the review.



> > Review in the PostgreSQL community does tend to be on the "harsh" side.

> Can you share an example of a review that you consider harsh? (feel free to share privately, I'm simply interested in what you consider harsh)

I wouldn't use the word harsh, but I do think there's plenty reviews where too much bikeshedding happens.


As the other responder noted, "harsh" was probably not the best adjective to use here, so I retract that.




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