I'm not addressing the complaints Emmanuel has about patch submission, but was inspired by what he said. I hesitated to post this to -hackers, but my hope is that my comments are taken in the spirit of reflection.
I've been thinking about the Postgres community and things that differentiate it from other FOSS projects for a few years. We lack both a benevolent dictator, or a single-corporate backer... We have an incredible reputation for technical expertise -- most knowledgeable FOSS developers fear and are in awe of the quality of code our community produces. I hear criticism for the way in which our development community operates, and how we communicate with "outsiders". But few people are able to offer concrete suggestions on /how/ we might change, as opposed to the /particular things/ that they think should change. So on this point: On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Emmanuel Cecchet <m...@frogthinker.org> wrote: > The commitfest started to > address some of the most obvious issues but there is probably much more that > can be done by looking at what is happening in the other open source > communities. Speaking from a cultural, and organizational standpoint: * Distributed revision control as standard for the project Using a distributed revision control system, and working from developer branches which are pulled & pushed directly between developers is consistently reported to have a positive impact on solving problems and sharing information. Summer of Code mentors consistently mention DVCS as having a huge positive impact on productivity for their students - both because it's easy and cheap for students to commit to their local repos, and because the merge/pull tools are intuitive for the mentors and students. This is how people work and share code "out there". I realize that Postgres has an established cultural norm of posting patches to the mailing list, and I'm not suggesting that people stop doing that. I think more developers should be sharing branches as well. git.postgresql.org should probably be reorganized to clearly divide repos between postgresql-core and other projects (contrib, add-ons, whatever). We should also publish more information about how our developers are sharing code with each other through repos. * Decision making Is there a project you'd point to as a model for decision making? (serious question) This is a volunteer organization, and as such, we're subject to who has the expertise + time/energy to devote to the patches and projects. Going back to what Bruce has said about skill drain -- if more individuals were able to get their time sponsored to devote to the technical challenges posed by the patches, then it might be possible to have more coordinated/streamlined responses and decision making. My experience in FOSS projects is that Postgres does fairly well on execution compared to other projects (getting a new release out the door every year, and now the alphas every couple months), but has some issues with a couple large, important patches. Part of the problem there appears to be people being stretched too thin, and inconsistent communication practices. More involvement from people really focusing on improving communication between developers would be helpful to make those issues easier to work around. * Volunteers, funding and burnout It's challenging to keep up with the technical discussions on -hackers even if you are a very knowledgeable developer. If you're only doing that on your free time, and say, you have a family? Most of the developers that I know in other projects in leadership/commit manager roles don't have young children, and very few are women. So, another thing that we could use are more people like Bruce that can devote a great deal of *work* time to thinking about and acting on the issues around community management and recruitment. Robert Haas' time spent on commitfest, for example, if sponsored by a foundation would be very helpful. Maybe he could have bought a new dishwasher. :) Also, we could use an individual dedicated to raising funds and consistently executing on distributing the money out for non-code "infrastructure" projects. Like: * release management, * marketing, * dedicated public relations (driving things like new software release articles, organizing interviews with press, and getting new case studies written), and * keeping track of our relationships with other organizations (Summer of Code, conferences, commercial forks). A lot of this work falls on Josh Berkus to coordinate. There are many more tasks, and some are delegated to others & coordinated on -advocacy. Again, this is work that could be funded through a foundation, or as part of positions in particular companies. IMO, it's about providing incentives that encourage people to use their time wisely, and to help prevent burnout on the difficult tasks around people management. And to say definitively that the people tasks require organization and management, and we as a development community value that. -selena -- http://chesnok.com/daily - me http://endpoint.com - work -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
