Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Change the name

Josh Berkus writes:

> What are you planning to ask -general, exactly?
>
> Unless it's a call for volunteers, anything you ask -general at this point
> will be nothing but a straw poll. You can't even regard it as a vote,
> because the folks on -general don't have enough information to make an
> informed decision.

I see -general as our user base, not as a bunch of uninformed 'folks' who
wouldn't know advocacy from a hole in the ground. This is supposed to be a
transparent project, and something like this should be put to the community
at large. The most effective way we have to do that right now is the
- -general list. Consider it a way to talk to the community, and see if anyone
has any pros and cons that this list may not have thought of yet.

> I've been waiting for the main proponents of changing the name to step up
> and do that research. This will be a good litmus test of whether those
> people will actually follow through to do the work required to change the
> name. So far, I've seen nothing but e-mail posts.

You are presupposing that your list of "research/work required" is the same as
everyone elses, especially those in the "Postgres" camp. I, for example,
have always advocated a gradual approach - a FAQ item, a news release,
and we're done. Graphics, etc. can come at their own pace. The project
has been living on two names for a long time now (more, if you count all
the misspellings), it can surely survive with the same top two names swapped
in officialness for a little while.

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Probably not. Consider the number of projects out there with odd names
> that are doing just fine.

Are they doing fine _despite_ their name? Let's be really honest, which
project has a worse name than ours?

> I still say we need to focus on our core strengths, the "Name" isn't
> relevant in that argument. Instead of expending energy on that, we
> should expending energy on doing everything we can to:
>
> Get windowing queries running
...
> Seriously, let's focus on something really important versus something
> that has zero technical ballast.

It's not a zero-sum game. Certainly the number of people who can work
on windowing queries are a very small percentage of our community. Nobody
is advocating that we stop Tom and Simon from coding and make them
recreate our handful of graphics.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane [email protected: g...@turnstep.com]
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200709141356
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8