To: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: Mitch Vincent <mitch@venux.net>, Frank Joerdens <frank@joerdens.de>,
	pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Re: Re: PostgreSQL vs Oracle vs DB2 vs MySQL - Which should I
 use?
References: <200102161621.LAA07039@candle.pha.pa.us>
From: Chris Jones <chris@mt.sri.com>
Date: 16 Feb 2001 09:58:35 -0700
In-Reply-To: Bruce Momjian's message of "Fri,
 16 Feb 2001 11:21:55 -0500 (EST)"
Message-ID: <a5fk86qh8ec.fsf@legolas.mt.sri.com>
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Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:

> > It is a problem. A human being just can't answer ten trillion emails a day
> > and do anything else productive.
> > 
[...]
> > 
> > The good thing about PostgreSQL is that you don't have many people
> > installing it to just play around. I foung that probably %80 of the
> > questions around the PHP mailing lists were from people that didn't have a
> > clue how to get started and wanted to install and code PHP because they
> > heard it was neat. I have nothing against that at all, it's a good thing
> > (sort of ), I just don't think we see that kind of attitude with PostgreSQL
> 
> 
> We will get those folks someday.  Right now, they are down in
> MySQL-land, but they could come soon.  In the old days, Linux served
> that purpose, and BSD sat more in the experienced camp.

Speaking of which...

At NetBSD, we're dealing with these problems through (ISTM) good
organization of volunteer efforts.  We have a www mailing list with
volunteers rotating on a weekly basis to answer questions.  We have a
netbsd-help list with a certain number of knowledgeable individuals
responding to the (sometimes very basic) questions that get posted
there.  Ideally, there would be some kind of a volunteer rotation on
the netbsd-help list, too; right now, one person handles probably 50%
of the questions there.  There are also people on most of the other
lists who are willing to redirect requests to netbsd-help when the
question isn't appropriate to the list at hand.

Ideally, there would be some kind of a rotation for answering
questions on the netbsd-help list, but that may not be very practical
-- questions posted there require different areas of expertise on the
part of the answerers.

Granted, NetBSD doesn't have the same volume of questions as a FreeBSD
or a Linux distro, but we don't have the same volume of experienced
volunteers, either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, as your demand for support
grows, and as your volunteers increase in number, you may not be able
to get them to match up with each other *unless* you throw some
organization at the problem.

Chris

-- 
chris@mt.sri.com -----------------------------------------------------
Chris Jones                                    SRI International, Inc.
                                                           www.sri.com