Re: Learning curves and such (was Re: pgFoundry)

* Brendan Jurd (direvus(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> I'm detecting sarcasm here, but just in case you're being serious ...

Yeah, for the most part I *was* being quite serious.

> For such a tool to serve its intended purpose, the postgres community
> needs to be, to a certain extent, agreed on and aware of its use as
> the primary dev management system.
>
> There's no point creating, hosting, updating and maintaining anything
> if the community isn't using it.

Nope, that's not the way the world works. "If you build it, they will
come." You'll want to make the *community* aware of it, sure, but
that's just to encourage people to use it. You don't need anything to
be agreed upon, either people will use it, or they won't. If enough
people use it that it becomes apparent that it's clearly better *then*
you'll likely get a more buy-in and acceptance from developers.

Until the developers are on-board you'll need to act as an intermediary
(unless you can automate it) between the people using your system and
the developers. That's more of your time, but if you're willing to
spend it on this to prove it's a better way to work, then go for it.

You're never going to get everyone to whole-sale jump over to a new
system. It's just not going to happen. You need to build the basics
and then get people to start using it. Eventually if it manages to get
to a critical mass of some sort you'll get enough people using it that
some of them may be willing to help maintain it- perhaps not even
developers but other people who are willing to help with the interaction
with the developers.

You could always start by just doing the 'todo' list that Bruce has and
maintaining it as a set of 'enhancements' in the system you build. That
shouldn't even be very hard to keep up to date w/ Bruce's todo list
provided you watch for his commits to it on the CVS mailing list. Then,
if people decide to use your system to open up new enhancement requests
you can forward them on to the appropriate list/people and if it makes
it onto Bruce's 'todo' list then some how mark it as 'approved' or
something to distinguish it from stuff that's been suggested/asked for
that *doesn't* make it on the list (and thus is unlikely to be done or
worked on). Having the list of "stuff that didn't make it" would
actually be useful and is something Bruce's list misses and thus would
be a valuable addition (imv) you would be providing.

Now, generally the way this kind of stuff works is that someone gets
bitten by a bug and just decides this would be useful and just *does* it
w/o asking permission or getting approval from anyone. When people just
ask permission or nebulously volunteer their time towards it, generally
it *doesn't* happen.

Just my 2c.

Stephen