In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, mmoncure@gmail.com ("Merlin Moncure") transmitted:
> hm. that's all very true (and important), but I try and keep focus
> on the things besides basic correctness that drive the development
> cultural divide that seperates the two communities. pg, besides
> being a very project and surrounded by wonderful people, 'feels'
> right when solving problems. why does it feel right? what kinds of
> things in the database influence the development culture? pg
> satisfies me on a much deeper level that transcends feature 'x' or
> 'y' but stems from something much more vital and vibrant. it seems
> like the biggest brains who really 'get it' are here, and that's why
> I'm here.
One cultural divide is that MySQL development takes place inside one
private company, whereas PostgreSQL is developed by what truly is a
global community. That difference has a lot of side-effects.
One thing that doesn't quite stem directly from that is that there are
definitely some deep thinkers in the PostgreSQL community. And they
consistently think beyond the scope of any given immediate problem.
They don't just try to patch over some immediate issue; they try to
see if there's a further issue.
For instance, we recently (in the last year) had some challenges
compiling PostgreSQL on AIX, and reported as much. An "immediate"
resolution might have been to tweak the config script a little. What
we got instead was something of an audit of "weird libs still in use."
A number of build changes were made to assortedly remove now-obsolete
libs, and to have specific programs compile in only those libraries
that they actually need. We'll see, when 8.2 is getting deployed, if
this fully addresses our AIX issues; I expect it's close.
What was interesting was that not only was the fix completely
different from what was expected, but it became a more ambitious
change that cleans up things on a lot of platforms.
That seems not uncommon; someone comes, thinking they have The Answer
to something. Further examination shows that it wasn't the right
question, but someone figures out what that question should have been
:-).
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