[MBlume]

Coming at this from a naive outsider perspective, the central problem described in the post (commits to PostgreSQL frequently have serious defects which must be addressed in follow-up commits) seems like one that would ideally be addressed with automated testing and CI tooling. What kind of testing does the Postgres project have? Are there tests which must pass before a commit can be integrated in the main branch? Are there tests that are only run nightly? Is most core functionality covered by quick-running unit tests, or are there significant pieces which can only be tested by hours-long integration tests? How expensive is it, in machine-hours, to run the full test suite, and how often is this done? What kinds of requirements are in place for including new tests with new code?

[kapilvt]

I would also note that the fix prs started landing the day after the initial commit, and other issues noted had fixes within three weeks. And of course postgresql has testing, but at universal distribution and use cases on things that will test both scheduler, network, fs, io drivers (Linux kernel, postgresql, etc, among others), some things need wider audiences or more extreme testing scenarios (SQLite for a strict subset of those considerations), and project health is measured by responding to that in a timely fashion. Afaics this is all about trunk/main, versus releases as well. So while its labeled its hard on the post (from a long time pg contributor), and yeah i might agree (cause maintainer on other software, so yeah all this resonates heavily), I’d also say its an example of things done right.

Seems like a reason to celebrate the open source model, and specifically here on how to do things better. Not to detract from universal issues for any project on maintainer availability. But, imagine a non oss database vendor with that degree of transparency or velocity, i can’t think of any that are doing anything close unless they got popped on a remote cve, aka prioritized above features or politics on a corporate dev sprint. Aka all software has bugs, it’s about how fast things are fixed, and in the context of oss imho fostering evolution among a diverse set of maintainers and use cases seems to be a better way.

As another example of that, ‘twas a PostgreSQL hacker at MS, that prevented Libxz from going wide because of caring due to perf regression and doing the analysis.

[bedman12345]

Most database companies run only a small amount of tests before committing. After committing, you run tests for thousands of hours. It sucks. You probably do this all day every day. You just run the tests on whatever you have currently committed. you kind of have to be careful about not adding more tests that make it take much much longer. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

[brazzy]

Ahh, thanks, that piece of information suddenly makes TFA makes sense. I was wondering how it could be that those issues were not caught by unit tests before committing/merging, but seemed to be caught soon afterwards in a way that they could still immediately be ascribed to a specific commit.