> I agree. The support from the Postgres people is outstanding. There
> seems to be a catch though. It was pretty much the same with PHP about 3
> years ago: I story I keep telling is that my very first question on the
> list there was answered in less than 30 minutes by Rasmus Lerdorf, the
> inventor of PHP himself (imagine posting a question to M$ and within 30
> mins, the founder of the company . . . ). He's still very active on the
> list but the sheer volume of postings has reached a limit, due to the
> popularity and success of PHP, where a _lot_ is getting lost and
> unanswered in php-general. I wonder whether this is an inbuilt,
> unavoidable problem with free software projects once they reach a certain
> level of popularity.
Funny you should mention PHP. I talked to Rasmus about the email volume
when I first met him in the fall. He said the volume of email is so
great that just reading the subject lines takes a long time.
We aren't there yet, but we are heading in that direction. One thing
some of us have done are to take full-time jobs with PostgreSQL so we
can handle the increased load. Second, I have started to skip emails
with subjects that contain obvious questions, relying on other users to
answer these. When several people post on the easy question, I start to
suspect there is some issue there and start reading.
Tom Lane has been very valuable in reading emails and responding to
questions.
One major thing I have done is to start reading the email in threaded
mode, so all subjects appear together. The ordering is based on the
first posting of the question, with followups appearing right after it.
Elm handles this, so I assume other mail readers to as well. This is
very helpful when I wake up in the morning and have >100 emails to read.
I can quickly scan through emails because they are all groups on the
same topic.
I suppose the major issue is not to get an answer from a major developer
each time, but to get a quick answer to your quesions, and have tough
queries properly addressed.
--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 853-3000
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