Comment by 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?