FOSDEM/PGDay 2026 Developer Meeting
See https://2026.fosdempgday.org/devmeeting/ for venue and other general information.
Schedule
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 08:00–09:00 | Coffee (not breakfast) |
| 09:00–09:10 | Welcome and introductions |
| 09:10–09:30 | Review of the state of development processes and commitfests |
| 09:30–09:50 | Planning for the upcoming beta period
Schedule, packaging, Release Management Team, etc. |
| 09:50–10:10 | What can we do to reduce the need for rebasing patches? (Daniel)
In the past, OID conflicts was a common reason for patches no longer applying, and since we started recommending to use OIDs from a set, that has drastically reduced. We also ask patches to not bump catalog version, which also helps, but it's worth discussing if we can do more. Can we make a separate guc_parameters.dat for patches in flight to remove GUC collisions from rebase conflicts? Are there other causes of trivial conflicts we can remove? |
| 10:10–10:30 | How to deal with patches that generate a lot of refactoring? (Bertrand)
If a refactoring idea is worth it and would need to update say 200 files with say 1000 changes, how do we proceed? It probably has to be split to ease the review and to avoid rebases for patches waiting in the commitfest. |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee |
| 11:00–12:30 | Development project status mini-presentations (5 min presentation + 5 min Q&A and changeover)
|
| 12:30–13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30–14:30 | Building the next generation of open source contributors, with Claire Giordano
(small presentation followed by discussion, inspired by this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/JDZXFE-next-generation-contributors-lessons-from-postgres/) |
| 14:30–15:00 | Dealing with near worthless/automated/synthetic patch submissions and reviews (Tomas) |
| 15:00–15:25 | Commitfest website feedback and brainstorming |
| 15:25–15:30 | Group photo |
| 15:30–16:00 | Tea |
| 16:00–16:20 | Any other business
|
| 16:20–17:00 | Patch triage
(see below) |
(room available until 18:00)
Participants
- Alexander Korotkov
- Álvaro Herrera
- Amit Langote
- Bertrand Drouvot
- Bruce Momjian
- Christoph Berg
- Daniel Gustafsson
- Dave Page
- Devrim Gündüz
- Jelte Fennema-Nio (afternoon)
- Joe Conway
- Magnus Hagander
- Matthias van de Meent
- Nazir Bilal Yavuz
- Peter Eisentraut (organizer)
- Thomas Munro
- Tomas Vondra
Patch triage
Attendees: Nominate patches to discuss during the patch triage section here. Additional patches can be added during the meeting, depending on the available time.
- https://commitfest.postgresql.org/patch/6050/ (Peter)
- 64-bit xids (Alexander)
- Logical Replication ("making tid and HOTness of UPDATE available to logical decoding plugins" etc. (Matthias)
- …
Group photo
Notes
- Review of the state of development processes and commitfests
- discussion about having subsystem maintainers, to enable contact points for patch submissions; could use tags in CF app to organize this
- discussion about being able to follow patches without signing up as reviewer
- straw poll: 9–0 in favor of having only one commitfest per development cycle, provided some mechanism of aging out stale patches earlier
- reduce the need for rebasing patches
- sources of conflicts?
- #includes
- new GUCs added at end of lists (might be obsolete)
- typos fixes
- pg_proc.dat
- idea: pg_xxx.dat.new during patch development
- maybe reorder pg_proc.dat to discourage everyone trying to add new entries in the same place
- collect more data about conflict causes from cfbot?
- sources of conflicts?
- dealing with large refactoring patches
- split patches into series, large mechanical changes could use "nocfbot-" prefix
- some large changes could be parked for after feature freeze; register under Open Items
- discussion about backpatching impact
- Planning for the upcoming beta period
- RMT (Tomas):
- regular meetings every two weeks were useful
- question about what "mid-beta" means
- packaging:
- getting extension authors to update their extensions for a new major release is a challenge every year
- unclear when extensions are expected to be ready, some extension authors don't want to put in the work too early
- suggestion: extension authors should start their work after the June/July beta, extensions ready for August beta (would need to be documented)
- RMT (Tomas):
- synthetic patch submissions and reviews
- discussion on possible incentives (credit, work/school work, native language, experimentation), possible remedies
- Commitfest website feedback and brainstorming
- forwarded some of the discussion above to CF app developer
- "follow patch" could be the same as current "subscribe to patch" without email
- access control to CF app needs to be refined, currently only former CF managers can edit certain things such as tags
- the newly deployed automoving functionality will run for the first time on 1st Feb., exciting
- other
- Bruce: new PCI standard no longer allows disk encryption; temporary files compression work might make TDE work easier in the future
- Devrim: wants more advance notice of new or raised dependencies, authors/committers are encouraged to notify pgsql-packagers right away
- Christoph: straw poll: 9–0 in favor of disabling JIT by default
- patch triage
- 64-bit xids patch was discussed extensively, everyone is in favor of having it, work should continue
