Re: pgFoundry

On Fri, 6 May 2005 01:32 pm, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Hello,
>
> PgFoundry has been brought up quite a bit lately. How we want
> it to succeed, how we want it to be the hub of PostgreSQL development.
> So my question is... Why isn't it?

Because it's not the hub of PostgreSQL development. I think it will be difficult to
build a culture of "This" is the place to be unless we actually kill gborg totally.
Currently there are still projects there, I'm personally never sure where to look
for a particular project. Even some of the more high profile projects like Slony-I
aren't even on PgFoundy. How can we expect people to take it seriously.

Issue two, which I know is being resolved, is that people find it painfully slow to
navigate. Who wants to search a sight that is painfully slow. But until the site is
running at a good speed, and can support a reasonably large number of projects
at that speed, are people going to be encouraged to move over? I don't think so.

I know there are issues with the CVS statistics. If I'm looking
for a project to forfill a function, looking at the statistics is a good way to determine
if the project is going anywhere or not. As well as releases. Currently every project
say "This project has no CVS history." and lists 0 commits and 0 adds. I don't think
this generally looks good for us. If there was no information, it would be better than
the false information.

Also a little more prominence on the PostgreSQL main page would be helpful.
I know there is a link, but to the unknowning user, what is pgFoundry about?
Maybe some advertisting about the fact that is you want something that runs with
your PostgreSQL server, head on over to pgFoundry to find it.

We should encourage any OSS projects that are for PostgreSQL to use
pgFoundry instead of any other hosting source. One very basic example is the
nss library I have been working on. I recently found that in February, another fork
of the nss library had popped up on debian's Gforge site. I had no idea it existed,
and they had no idea I existed, and they use PostgreSQL fairly exclusively. Where
were they looking for an nss library when then needed one? Well, it obviously wasn't
at pgFoundry.

> Why is PostgreSQL not hosted at pgFoundry?
> It seems that it has everything we would need?

This is possibly true, it gives the advantage of trackers and many functions that
the lists are used for. Maybe it's less likely we would lose patches and/or bugs.

I don't really have a lot of knowledge about the benefits disadvantages, so I'll
leave the people who actually use CVS and things like that to make a comment.
>
> To keep this on track, consider my question as if it were 2 months from
> now and pgFoundry was all up on the new servers etc...

Personally, this is a problem. It's another 2 months away. In that time, I think we
also need to focus on getting rid of gborg and redirecting people to pgFoundry.
But can the current setup handle the load, and can we get the move from gborg done?
Also is the upgrade path for moving servers easy, if it is it's probably more reason to
push for the full closure of gborg.

Now, despite the apparent large number of complaints. I think pgFoundry is a very good
idea, and will work well in the long run. I just think we need to get some things going
well to get people on the site more. Once that happens, people will instinctively look there.

Sincerely,

Russell Smith