Time to scale up? - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Dear Community,
The core development team has a strong and well motivated urge to keep
the PostgreSQL code base focused. They don't want it to grow much and
they don't want to maintain code that is written in other languages then
C. This is the way it has been for a long time and I'm in no way
questioning what has been accomplished so far. Question is, is that the
way to go forward? Controversial question perhaps but nevertheless worth
debating. Especially given the latest discussions regarding inclusion of
pl/java and pl/ruby in core.

A direct consequence of todays organization is that very useful
functionality is scattered in several places with a significant level of
uncertainty as to what is released and stable and what is just a
prototype. PostgreSQL takes a beating in database comparisons and the
community must time after another correct journalists that tend to
"forget" the plethora of add-on modules that exists. Another consequence
is that when using PostgreSQL, you are encouraged to use stored
procedure languages that can be implemented with a few lines of code and
in pure C. A user would probably rather see criterion's like feature
richness and standards conformant. These problems persist although a
number of actors bundle PostgreSQL with various modules today.

A resolution to the problem would be to allow the core team to scale up.
More people are needed to support a more comprehensive set of features.
So why not create specialized teams that are part of the
core-development trust? Teams that specialize in replication, in Java,
and in other areas where the core team feel that their knowledge and/or
resources are too limited.

It seems to me that the community already have people that could step
right in and take on this responsibility. We could ask people from the
most prominent replication solutions to merge and form a team that would
maintain a well defined replication portfolio. The developers that
maintain the jdbc driver + people from pl/java and pl/j could do the
same for Java. There are a few more areas where this would make a lot of
sense. It's all about restructuring the management of the core parts of
PostgreSQL in order to make it scale resource wise. It cannot, and will
not, be solved by creating yet another project on PgFoundry.

I know I brought this up in 'hackers' a week ago. I got no response
there. I bring it up again here partly because that was the wrong forum
but also because I feel that the current way to add features to the core
is less then perfect and needs to be discussed. I feel that a good
resolution to my concerns is extremely important for the future success
of a great database. Perhaps everything that I've said so far is
self-evident and thoroughly debated already. In that case, please excuse
my rambling and point me in the right direction.

Kind Regards,
Thomas Hallgren