Re: Why we are going to have to go DirectIO

Magnus,

> So in order to get *testing* we need to pay somebody. But to build a great
> database server, we can rely on volunteer efforts or sponsorship from
> companies who are interested in moving the project forward? That hardly
> seems right... Either it's just not high enough on peoples priority lists
> (in which case you're not likely to get anybody to actually pay for it
> either), or there is some other reason why people just don't care.

It's *always* much easier to get money for features than for other
things. Earlier this year I was really hoping that our new corporate
community members, who seemed to be interested in testing, would put
some serious resources behind this. When pressed, however, they did
what everyone does -- pass and hope that someone else will pay for it.
Huawei staff at least did add a bunch of regression tests, which was
great, but it's a fraction of the work we need for a more comprehensive
testing infrastructure. I got this pretty quickly when Andrew and I led
the session at the unconference. Everybody wanted better testing, but
they all wanted someone else to foot the bill.

We also have the issue that many folks on this list think that testing
isn't important, which further discourages anyone from committing their
own time. But even if the enthusiasm for testing was universal, I think
that we'd need to find money for someone.

I don't think this is prohibitive, though; we do very little fundraising
in this community, and if a testing project had official community
endorsement, I think it would be relatively easy to raise money for it.
Provided that we avoid bikeshedding it to death, of course.

> Figuring
> that out would probably be a pre-requisite to get it done. But sure - I'm
> all for trying a kickstarter. Did anybody ever try that for an actual
> postgres feature? Didn't JD and/or cmd and/or pgus at some point try
> something like that?

CMD raised money for the FK locks feature. 2Q has raised money for
several features. So has PGX.

I'd rather do the testing thing as a community thing, though, which
means raising non-profit money and having an open bid process for the
person to do the work. I think we cold raise more money that way, and
are likely to get a better end result.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com