Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

Dave Page wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
>> You might have noted that part of the suggestion I was acting on here
>> included making the project maintainers responsible (and able) to keep that
>> info up to date. At no point can it ever be the WWW team's responsibility
>> to do that sort of thing--everybody knows that won't scale.
>>
>
> The problem is, they rarely do keep them up to date. We get the
> occasional email requesting changes, but most people aren't checking
> these things regularly enough to keep them up to date.
>

There's a chicken/egg problem here: the catalogue isn't very useful to
a lot of people due to its UI issues. Because of that, people don't
really use the catalog. As such, there's very little motivation to keep
it current anyway.

As for concerns about project data getting stale, the whole point of
talking about the compatible version is that projects are out of date
already, but there's no way to know that. If there were a version tag
on there, and it mentioned an ancient version because the maintainer
doesn't care, that's a valuable data point for someone browsing the
catalogue, right? If the catalog gets to where it's useful to more
people, the projects that have good community support will mention they
work with the latest versions as they come out and get updated there,
and the abandoned projects won't, and from some perspectives that could
be considered a good thing because it makes it easier to figure out
which are the serious projects.

> I'd also note, that the addition of an 'edit' option to the existing
> pages would seem sensible, as opposed to the 'throw the bath out with
> the water' approach of just moving it all to the wiki, where marketing
> teams will have a field day making their products stand out.
>
One reason the format on that prototype page was so constrained was to
keep that from being possible without said edit sticking out. If all
the other entries are short, somebody who tries to make their product
stand out by bucking the standard format is going to look pretty silly.
But the larger point that encouraging edit wars on a resources mainly
aimed at community support is taken anyway.

Let me see if I can wrap up this part...as for a wishlist for what the
catalogue would need to do in order to work better as a community
project locator, I think those are:

-Make it easy for people to edit their catalogue entries.
-Add a short description field, limited to around 60 characters. Can
initially populate this by taking the first 57 characters of the
existing description and adding in "..." if it's longer than that.
-Add a new "Compatible database versions" field. Make these all empty
initially. Seeing who fills them in will be an interesting bit of data
about which projects are paying attention.
-Create a couple of simplified views of the data:
--Single page list of all entries in the catalog, with entires that fit
in a moderately wide line: product, short description, version info, license
--Same thing but only the open-source projects listed

I know I'd rather see work on those things instead of trying to salvage
pgFoundry as a catalog, which as the other Greg pointed out is an effort
whose opportunity has already passed.

P.S. "Add-Ons and Tools" page is now removed from the wiki, its
usefulness as a prototype seems to have passed.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com