Over the past month, several major features got reverted from Postgres 19. At this point, even if everything else goes perfectly, Postgres 19 will be released about a month later than originally planned. A couple recent blog posts seem to suggest the reverts happened due to AI finding complex bugs in those patches, with fixes way too invasive this late in the development cycle. I don’t think that narrative matches reality, and I think it matters to correct that.
If I could give one piece of advice to the past me, starting to contribute to open source projects, it’d be to value other developers' time more. It took me a while to appreciate the “economy” behind this, and adjust how I work to increase my chance of getting patches done. Hopefully some new contributors could learn from my mistakes.
Every now and then I need a break from writing code. In those cases I like looking at data about a subject I’m interested in - looking for trends, quantifying the expected effects, and so on. I needed just such a break a couple days ago, and I decided to look at statistics about the development activity of the Postgres project. So, here’s a bunch of charts (with a bit of commentary).
A couple months back I posted about maybe adjusting random_page_cost to better reflect how current storage handles random and sequential access. I had a bunch of great discussions about the topic since then, but ultimately I got distracted by other stuff.
POSETTE happened last week, with my pre-recorded talk about this very topic (and many other great talks, BTW). Which reminded me that I started thinking about random_page_cost a bit differently. So here’s an update with some more thoughts.
At a couple recent conferences, I got to describe the process Postgres uses to select new committers/maintainers. Usually to users and developers using Postgres, but in some cases it was unclear even to experienced Postgres contributors.
The official docs are rather brief, and don’t explain various important details. Let me explain how I understand the informal process, who’s responsible for what etc.
This post is not meant to give you advice on how to become a committer, that’s a far more subjective question. Perhaps in some future post, not sure yet.
