On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:12, Frank Joerdens wrote:
> > Helpful developers doesn't go near far enough..
> >
> > I've seen (and still do see) commercial support that isn't up to the
> > grade of support I have gotten from the -general and -hackers lists. I
> > can ask any question and I *always* get a response within minutes from
> > one of the core developers.. I have yet to have a question go
> > un-answered and I've been on the list for a pretty long time! It just
> > doesn't get much better than that to me.
>
> 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.
Yes it is.
This is a universal problem. It is that once a particular package reaches
that critical mass it is completely impossible for a small team of
developers to both help the user community _and_ to develop anything at
all. I've seen this in both the free and the comercial software worlds.
The commercial world tries to solve it by having "Knowledge Base"
machinery of some kind or another. My own exp. is that it simply does not
work.
It might help to install ht://dig so that the online documentation can be
searched easily. If people think that that would be a good idea then I'd
be happy to make that contribution.
Another point is that PostgreSQL is widely used by people who have learnt
English at school. English is a proper horror of a language & it must be
extremely difficult to understand the docs. if you didn't learn English on
your Mother's knee. I learnt French at school, but I would really _hate_
to have to understand PostgreSQL from French docs. I'm suggesting that now
that the critical mass of users is nearly upon us that a serious
translation effort be made. Unfortunately I am not sufficiently able in
any foreign language to help with translation, but could perhaps attempt
to make the language of the documentation somewhat easier to understand.
--
Sincerely etc.,
NAME Christopher Sawtell
CELL PHONE 021 257 4451
ICQ UIN 45863470
EMAIL csawtell @ xtra . co . nz
CNOTES ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/C/tutorials/sawtell_C.tar.gz
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