Greg Smith wrote:
> Developing new features is fun and tends to attract sponsorship
> dollars. Testing a frozen release, finding bugs, and resolving them
> is boring, and no one sponsors it. Therefore, if you let both
> things go on at once, I guarantee you almost all of the community
> attention will be diverted toward new development during any period
> where both are happening at the same time.
Frankly, part of the problem is that it's hard for many of us to see
how to contribute effectively for most of these five months or so, in
general. In particular, if someone *is* willing to pay you to work
on developing a feature during these months, but not to work on any
other PostgreSQL development, what do you recommend?
> That means that there's no possible way you can keep new
> development open without hurting the dreary work around stabilizing
> the beta in the process.
Most of my time on stabilizing new releases has, in the past, been
volunteer, in spite of getting some time approved for testing some
releases on the clock. This time around, *all* time I spend on this
phase will be volunteer -- it's just a question of whether my *paid*
time is spent on new development for PostgreSQL, or things entirely
unrelated to PostgreSQL. If I'm working on PostgreSQL for pay, it
doesn't make me either less likely to volunteer time, or less skilled
at contributing during my volunteer efforts.
-Kevin
