Re: PostgreSQL Contributor levels

On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 1:51 PM Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Re: Jonathan S. Katz
> > That's a fair point. That said, I'd weigh it against the confusion of the
> > one-time action of promoting major contributors to "distinguished" vs. the
> > confusion of parsing the difference between "major" vs.
> > "significant"/"notable" or similar adjectives, where it's more challenging
> > to understand the difference.
>
> To fix that, we could rename Major to Distinguished and still go with
> Significant for level 2. But I don't quite see the need.
>

To be honest, I don't think we "need" any of this, but there are some
benefits that we might achieve by doing it (though I'd also say I'd
love to see a prototype list of what this new 3rd tier would look
like... it seems massive)

In any case, a few upsides that would fall out of this would be less
confusion between "contributors" from the release notes (I don't think
this is much of a problem, but it's been suggested in this thread, and
this would certainly reduce it since we wouldn't be using overlapping
terms) and the term "distinguished" would better align with industry
standards with regards to titles and career markers (which I'll admit,
is not a direct issue for the community, but it does affect how
corporations interact with the project, which isn't nothing give our
size and maturity). Granted both of those things could be achieved
without adding the 3rd tier.


Robert Treat
https://xzilla.net