Re: Heroku early upgrade is raising serious questions - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 06:14:25AM -0400, Dave Page wrote:
>> I do not believe that regular support companies should be included,
>> because there are too many of them, and they will likely be packaging
>> for a very small audience who in most cases could easily be using the
>> community packages. With so many people on the list, security and
>> confidentiality becomes impossible to enforce.
>
> I do agree on the confidentiality problem, I do not agree in the "in most cases could easily be using the
> community packages" part. Honestly, why would anyone pay a support company to
> build packages if they can use the free community ones instead? Ok, maybe some
> do because they simple don't know, but in general itÄs because they have some
> special needs.

Even if you put that aside though, there are nearly 300
support/services companies in our directory, most of whom are likely
to be unknown to the majority of us. Obviously there's no way we would
include all of them on the -packagers list, so how do we decide
fairly?

>> I support having the packagers of the mainstream packages on the list,
>> e.g. installers, RPMs, DEBs, Postgres.app, OS vendor packages etc
>> (e.g. Palle who provides the FreeBSD ports) etc.
>>
>> I also support having the large scale DBaaS providers on the list, as
>> they provide Postgres instances for thousands of users, very publicly
>> - Heroku, as the obvious example, have hundreds of thousands of
>> databases on their platform.
>
> So then it's a matter of users? What is the number of user one has to have to
> qualify? How do we count users? Installations, db admins, real database users
> as in customers?

Yes, that is what needs debate. I don't know how we can write down
specific criteria. I do know that when we tried to do something
similar to define who goes on the sponsors page, we got nowhere at all
because it's *really* hard to write such rules, without almost
immediately finding some exception that we'd have to make.

>> I cannot go into details at the moment, but their actions have been
>
> Why? I can see a reason why we don't talk about the bug or the fix in the open.
> Sure that makes sense because we have to have the fixed version out first. But
> why does the same hold for communication about deployment embargo?

Magnus has answered that nicely, so I won't repeat him.

>> taken following talks with the core team, in a difficult time, with no
>> precedence within the community to follow and very little time for
>
> You mean the PostgreSQL community, right?

Yes.

> Yes, hindsight is always 20/20. Again, I hope you see my email is part of a
> constructive discussion to get to a better policy for the next time, that
> hopefully will never come. :)

Of course - I've known you long enough to expect nothing less :-)

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company