> >> ... I wonder whether this is an inbuilt, > >> unavoidable problem with free software projects once they reach a certain > >> level of popularity. > > > Funny you should mention PHP. I talked to Rasmus about the email volume > > when I first met him in the fall. He said the volume of email is so > > great that just reading the subject lines takes a long time. > > > We aren't there yet, but we are heading in that direction. > > Yes, the shape of the curve is pretty clear --- it's already not > possible for the key developers to respond to everything, and that'll > get worse. We have to start thinking about ways to spread out the load > better. One idea is encouraging people to make local mailing lists all over the world. That will be easier to read/write mails for non-English speakers and will decrease the traffic in the main mailing list. Actually I have been running a mailing list in Japan for years and now it has +4000 subscribers. I believe this kind of thing has been already done in the world (maybe Japan, Russia ...?), but I think we should encourage them more, like having pointers to such lists on the pgsql web site. -- Tatsuo Ishii