When we talk about "big" patches, it's probably worth examining full change sets. The changes for removing vacuuming are here [1]. Compare that to those for the

When we talk about "big" patches, it's probably worth examining full change sets. The changes for removing vacuuming are here [1]. Compare that to those for the "biggest" 9.5 feature, upsert [2] (by Peter Geoghegan) and you can see that there's probably at least a full order of magnitude difference in effort there. That said, Postgres probably does have a problem in that there are too few people writing these major patches, but that number is greater than one. [1] http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=fd31cd265138019dcccc9b5fe53043670898bc9f http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;... [2] http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=168d5805e4c08bed7b95d351bf097cff7c07dd65 http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;...