I've deliberately let the dust settle slightly on this.

One thing that might help is a more open sponsorship "clearing house".
Example (not meant as a bid, but just to illustrate): the JDBC driver
needs a scanner overhaul - it breaks on dollar quoting and a bunch of
other stuff. I could do that work (as could others, of course) but I
don't have time, unless someone buys some of my professional time.
Someone might want to do just that, but how would they find me?

Regarding the secret code stuff - I predict that it will quickly bite
whoever does it, unless they are extremely lucky.

cheers

andrew


Bruce Momjian wrote:

>I am very excited to see companies involved in PostgreSQL development.
>It gives us funding for developers and features that is new for us. We
>had Fujitsu funding some features for 8.0 and that really helped us.
>
>However, there was a lot of coordination that happened with Fujitsu that
>I don't see happening with the current companies involved. Companies
>are already duplicating work that is also done by community members or
>by other companies. The big issue is communication. Because the
>PostgreSQL code base is common for most of the companies involved, there
>has to be coordination in what they are working on and their approaches.
>
>If that doesn't happen, two companies will work on the same feature, and
>only one can be added, or a complex process of merging the two patches
>into one patch has to happen --- again duplicated effort. I am willing
>to do the coordination, or even better, have the companies involved
>publicly post their efforts so all the other companies can know what
>is happening. I realize this is hard for companies because their
>efforts are in some ways part of their profitability. Does
>profitability require duplication of effort and code collisions? I am
>not sure, but if it does, we are in trouble. I am not sure the
>community has the resources to resolve that many collisions.
>
>Second, some developers are being hired from the community to work on
>closed-source additions to PostgreSQL. That is fine and great, but one
>way to kill PostgreSQL is to hire away its developers. If a commercial
>company wanted to hurt us, that is certainly one way they might do it.
>Anyway, it is a concern I have. I am hoping community members hired to
>do closed-source additions can at least spend some of their time on
>community work.
>
>And finally, we have a few companies working on features that they
>eventually want merged back into the PostgreSQL codebase. That is a
>very tricky process and usually goes badly unless the company seeks
>community involvement from the start, including user interface,
>implementation, and coding standards.
>
>I hate to be discouraging here, but I am trying to communicate what we
>have learned over the past few years to help companies be effective in
>working with open source communities. I am available to talk to any
>company that wants further details.
>
>
>

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On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 11:02:51PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Right now on the front page when we ask for support we are asking for
> people to donate money. We don't need money. We need people. The support
> link goes to bandwidth but a great deal of the project is hosted over
> many, many servers with many providers. That really isn't as much of an
> issue anymore. At least IMHO.

If money's not an issue anymore, can we get a bigger box to host
pgfoundry on then?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

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Anyone interested in pooling funds for features should take a look at
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html, which is about a FreeBSD
developer who offered to work full-time on developing some specific
features should enough people donate. Also worthy of mention is
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/.

I think that for certain key features there's probably a lot of people
who would fork over between $100 and $1000 towards getting a feature
completed. Improved replication might be a good example. Table
partitioning would absolutely be an example. If there was a means for
these people to donate money towards work being done on some feature,
it's very likely that large chunks of development time could be paid for
just from smaller shops, let alone places that can afford to toss $20k
towards the development of something.

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 12:47:45AM -0500, Kris Jurka wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> > One thing that might help is a more open sponsorship "clearing house".
> > Example (not meant as a bid, but just to illustrate): the JDBC driver
> > needs a scanner overhaul - it breaks on dollar quoting and a bunch of
> > other stuff. I could do that work (as could others, of course) but I
> > don't have time, unless someone buys some of my professional time.
> > Someone might want to do just that, but how would they find me?
>
> I don't think this is a big issue. I don't know of any companies who were
> desperate for a feature and willing to throw money at the problem who
> couldn't find a developer to take them up on it. Right now this seems to
> be a kind of behind the scenes operation that relies heavily on knowing
> the right people, but I think most of our sponsor contact points are able
> to point sponsors to the right people. Could this process be more open?
> Depends on how the sponsor wants to handle it, they probably don't just
> want to throw the task out there and see who comes calling, they want an
> assurance from someone they trust that the chosen developer is capable.
>
> One thing that definitely would be nice would be to be able to combine
> funds from various sponsors for various features. Alone a company can't
> spring for it, but by pooling resources it could get done. This is a lot
> tougher to coordinate and unless there is a complete spec in place
> different sponsors will pull in different directions. Other bounty type
> schemes don't seem to produce results, largely from a lack of cash.
> (Here's $500 for two weeks of work).
>
> Anyone care to shed some light on how it works now?
>
> Kris Jurka
>
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--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org
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On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 11:21:35PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >
> >
> >If money's not an issue anymore, can we get a bigger box to host
> >pgfoundry on then?
>
> It's been done and is in the process of being brought up at a new colo
> facility. There is also a backup box being built for failover purposes

Any ETA? I don't mean to harp, but it looks really bad when someone new
to postgresql comes to investigate something and the site is just
crawling.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

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> Anyone interested in pooling funds for features should take a look at
> http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html, which is about a FreeBSD
> developer who offered to work full-time on developing some specific
> features should enough people donate. Also worthy of mention is
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/.
This was really a great idea and we (my company) also supported it because
we use freebsd as our primary os. We also use PostgreSQL as our primary db
so it would be more than likely that we would donate money for something
similar with postgresql if either :
a) we can direct the money at one or more specific tasks
or
b) the tasks founded will be related to core postgresql features e.g.
generel performance or other benefits that fits all.

> I think that for certain key features there's probably a lot of people
> who would fork over between $100 and $1000 towards getting a feature
> completed.
Yes - without any promise I would probably be able to raise between $1000
and $3000 in a period of the next 3 months. I would definately try it
and I have multiple customers that have giving their intent on something
like this.

> Improved replication might be a good example. Table
> partitioning would absolutely be an example. If there was a means for
> these people to donate money towards work being done on some feature,
> it's very likely that large chunks of development time could be paid for
> just from smaller shops, let alone places that can afford to toss $20k
> towards the development of something.
I totally agree. In our preference list I would have the following tasks :
1) IOT (Index Ordered Tables)
2) Table partitioning
3) Better multimaster replication framework
4) Extending PostgreSQL's plugin support with additional hooks in the
backend e.g. :
- for adding new tablestore engines (like mysql can)
- for adding callbacks that get's called on transaction
success/failure
using SPI. (e.g. for housekeeping and cleanup)
5) Adding parameter support for NOTIFY / LISTEN

> Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org

Nicolai Petri
COD, catpipe systems - denmark


Ps. sorry for the x-post - should this be moved to advocacy ?



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Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when decibel@decibel.org ("Jim C. Nasby") wrote:
> Anyone interested in pooling funds for features should take a look at
> http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html, which is about a FreeBSD
> developer who offered to work full-time on developing some specific
> features should enough people donate. Also worthy of mention is
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/.
>
> I think that for certain key features there's probably a lot of people
> who would fork over between $100 and $1000 towards getting a feature
> completed. Improved replication might be a good example. Table
> partitioning would absolutely be an example. If there was a means for
> these people to donate money towards work being done on some feature,
> it's very likely that large chunks of development time could be paid for
> just from smaller shops, let alone places that can afford to toss $20k
> towards the development of something.

Note that money isn't necessarily the most useful thing.

For Slony-I, I can think of three places where specific contributions
of specific efforts could be really valuable, and potentially free up
other peoples' time to do "heavier lifting."

1. Fully scripted test cases.

There are about a dozen scripts that exist now that test for a
number of known conditions, either generally checking to see if
replication is functioning, or trying to exercise particular
bits of functionaly, or verifying that certain bugs are either
present or absent.

There are some tests I'd like to set up but never get time to
script up. Improving the tests that can be _trivially_ run
would be a big help, and would have a general positive effect
on reliability.

2. Documentation

I tried to get someone to write up "how to do PG upgrades using
Slony-I"; wound up essentially writing it myself.

There is plenty of room for "How I Did Foo With ..." with Things
Other Haven't Tried yet. For instance, I haven't tried Slony-I
on cases involving inheritance; a test script and a document on
this would be super.

3. Actually requesting features

There is a small queue of outside-requested features for Slony-I,
but the queue is pretty small. The vast majority of things
queued have come from discussions between about 4 people, all of
whom are writing code for the project.

I daresay I am being totally myopic here, thinking only of "my
project." There lie my priorities, tough luck :-)!

I'd hazard the guess that would-be contributors might be better off
contributing relatively small things like improving documentation or
assisting by providing usefully detailed test cases than they would be
in contributing small sums of money.

It is _really_ not obvious how specks of money can be usefully put
together to get bigger features to happen.

I think a REALLY valuable thing would be if we could get another
person that was pretty expert with the query optimizer. The only way
to do that is to get someone to spend a year fighting with it.
Throwing a thousand dollars at someone here and there isn't likely to
direct them towards that.
--
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