Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Increased company involvement

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when decibel(at)decibel(dot)org ("Jim C. Nasby") wrote:
> Anyone interested in pooling funds for features should take a look at
> http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html, which is about a FreeBSD
> developer who offered to work full-time on developing some specific
> features should enough people donate. Also worthy of mention is
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/.
>
> I think that for certain key features there's probably a lot of people
> who would fork over between $100 and $1000 towards getting a feature
> completed. Improved replication might be a good example. Table
> partitioning would absolutely be an example. If there was a means for
> these people to donate money towards work being done on some feature,
> it's very likely that large chunks of development time could be paid for
> just from smaller shops, let alone places that can afford to toss $20k
> towards the development of something.

Note that money isn't necessarily the most useful thing.

For Slony-I, I can think of three places where specific contributions
of specific efforts could be really valuable, and potentially free up
other peoples' time to do "heavier lifting."

1. Fully scripted test cases.

There are about a dozen scripts that exist now that test for a
number of known conditions, either generally checking to see if
replication is functioning, or trying to exercise particular
bits of functionaly, or verifying that certain bugs are either
present or absent.

There are some tests I'd like to set up but never get time to
script up. Improving the tests that can be _trivially_ run
would be a big help, and would have a general positive effect
on reliability.

2. Documentation

I tried to get someone to write up "how to do PG upgrades using
Slony-I"; wound up essentially writing it myself.

There is plenty of room for "How I Did Foo With ..." with Things
Other Haven't Tried yet. For instance, I haven't tried Slony-I
on cases involving inheritance; a test script and a document on
this would be super.

3. Actually requesting features

There is a small queue of outside-requested features for Slony-I,
but the queue is pretty small. The vast majority of things
queued have come from discussions between about 4 people, all of
whom are writing code for the project.

I daresay I am being totally myopic here, thinking only of "my
project." There lie my priorities, tough luck :-)!

I'd hazard the guess that would-be contributors might be better off
contributing relatively small things like improving documentation or
assisting by providing usefully detailed test cases than they would be
in contributing small sums of money.

It is _really_ not obvious how specks of money can be usefully put
together to get bigger features to happen.

I think a REALLY valuable thing would be if we could get another
person that was pretty expert with the query optimizer. The only way
to do that is to get someone to spend a year fighting with it.
Throwing a thousand dollars at someone here and there isn't likely to
direct them towards that.
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