Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might point to the character of discourse on the mailing list, others to the shortage of patch reviewers, and others still to the difficulty of getting the attention of a committer, or of feeling like a hostage to some committer's whimsy. All of these are problems, but today I want to focus on the purely technical aspect of the problem: the extreme difficulty of writing reasonably correct patches.