[Info-Ingres] ingres janitors

[grof at rogers.com]

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your interest. It's obvious you care or you wouldn't
have come here. Constructive criticism is especially appreciated.


I'd like to build upon what my colleagues (inside & outside of Ingres)
have said and hopefully add to the discussion you've started.


You're right, there are interesting technologies out there and we're
competing with them. We know this and don't think for one instant it's
going to be easy.

Here's our simple plan to make Ingres more attractive:


Step 1: Remove as many barriers to developing, testing, and using
Ingres as we can

This includes solving tooling issues, making our discussions more
public, providing training and mentoring, providing reasonable
opportunities for interested parties to get their feet wet and work
with us.

We can measure this. It must take less time and effort (clicks,
commands, etc.) to get an environment up and running with Ingres than
with our competition.

If we make Ingres easier to develop one (and use) than our
competitors, we've done our jobs well. This isn't going to happen over
night. We'll get there with a series of smart priority calls, constant
feedback, and hard work over time.


Step 2: Go beyond some of our competitors in terms of meritocratic
opportunity

We'd like to enable community to work along side our engineering and
support teams. Success is the day when a good submission is a good
submission regardless of where it came from. This too is measurable.

To move towards this vision, we're going to post ideas, bugs, and
other opportunities. We encourage anyone to review the list (right now
on our wiki, soon in Trac) to select something they'd like to take on.
The process is very simple:
a) Pick something you feel you can take on.
b) Review your proposal with an expert (be it an employee or community
member) to get pre-approval.
c) Once you have the approval, do the work editing/compiling/testing
d) Submit the patch for review (possibly do some updates based on
feedback)
e) The patch is committed to the code base
[rinse and repeat]

We're grateful to have bug reports and feedback on how the software's
working just as much as we're grateful to have patch submissions.


Step 3: Do work in interesting areas

This speaks to another one of your points.

If we haven't done a good job broadcasting it, we are developing
technologies with Eclipse, OSGEO, Trac, LXR, Jasparsoft, Hibernate,
and many others. In my opinion, we are doing very cool work, we're
just (possibly) doing a poor job of sharing the fact we're doing it.

Thoughts, comments, and suggestions are always appreciated.

Andrew