Academic research on programmers' motivation

Dear PostgreSQL developers, 

We are researching the motivation factors of Open Source software
programmers and would like to ask your cooperation in our large-scale
research. The research is performed for the Amsterdam Business School of
the University of Amsterdam. Your participation would consist of
completing an online survey to which we have linked below. Your
participation is completely anonymous and the research publication will
be freely available, including the results of the survey.
 
The goal of the research is to better understand the motivations
software programmers have for joining and contributing to an Open Source
project. The insights gained from this research would help the
development of theory for Information Management and could help
practitioners better understand Open Source projects. Next to this, the
publication of this research will increase the exposure of the
development of Open Source software within the academic environment.
Please follow the link to the online survey.

Our test audience has shown that completing the survey will take about
15 minutes. Your time is highly appreciated by us.
 
http://bit.ly/Survey_Developers_Motivation
 
Kind regards,
Dr. Thomas Adelaar
Mark Pith

PS If you reply to this message, please include mark(dot)pith(at)student(dot)uva(dot)nl
as CC for a faster response.
-This independent research is not related to the PostgreSQL project.-
>From pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org Mon Nov 16 10:06:11 2009
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From: "Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Listen / Notify - what to do when the queue is full
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> We still need to decide what to do with queue full situations in
> the proposed listen/notify implementation. I have a new version
> of the patch to allow for a variable payload size. However, the
> whole notification must fit into one page so the payload needs
> to be less than 8K.

That sounds fine to me, FWIW.

> I have also added the XID, so that we can write to the queue before
> committing to clog which allows for rollback if we encounter write
> errors (disk full for example). Especially the implications of this
> change make the patch a lot more complicated.

Can you elaborate on the use case for this?

> so it won't update its pointer for some time. With the current space we can
> acommodate at least 2147483647 notifications or more, depending on the
> payload length.

That's a whole lot of notifications. I doubt any program out there is using
anywhere near that number at the moment. In my applications, having a
few hundred notifications active at one time is "a lot" in my book. :)

> These are the solutions that I currently see:
>
> 1) drop new notifications if the queue is full (silently or with rollback)

I like this one best, but not with silence of course. While it's not the most
polite thing to do, this is for a super extreme edge case. I'd rather just
throw an exception if the queue is full rather than start messing with the
readers. It's a possible denial of service attack too, but so is the current
implementation in a way - at least I don't think apps would perform very
optimally with 2147483647 entries in the pg_listener table :)

If you need some real-world use cases involving payloads, let me know, I've
been waiting for this feature for some time and have it all mapped out.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
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