I agree that this is a significant issue. I'm less sure about the "better name recognition" bit, I feel there's also a significant drop off at the other end. But that might just be biased by my level of experience.
> - The organization of the Postgres mailing list is not very good. You are forced to drink from the firehose that is pgsql-hackers, whereas the LKML is organized into various subsystems. Modern code forges have value in that you can subscribe to certain tags on PRs/issues, which isn't the case with the current state of pgsql-hackers.
Yep. And it has gotten a lot worse in the last couple years, I'd say.
> - Adding things to a commitfest is a little burdensome. The only way to get a patch through the entire Postgres CI is adding it to the commitfest, and even then, you have to be proactive about checking it, or hope that a committer will tell you to look at the CI failure.
My main reason to reply here was this: You can also enable CI in your repository: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tools/c... - that's the same CI that happens for commitfest entries.
> - Bug reports are also sent to a mailing list (pgsql-bugs). There is no equivalent to the Linux bugzilla for Postgres for instance.
Yep, I hate this. I loose track of things all the time, I'm way too easily distractable. I think the kernel bugzilla is pretty useless, but it's not that hard to do better than that.
> - Patches are sent as attachments to emails, and not necessarily git-format-patched either, whereas the LKML uses git-send-email exclusively from what I can tell.
I find lkml style patch handling bad as well, particularly with every patchset revision getting its own thread. Very easy to loose track.
> All in all, it kind of seems like tooling in the Postgres contributor community works best for those that have been ingrained in it for 15+ years, which I guess is the case for most things.
I personally wouldn't say it works particularly well, even after participating in development for about 15 years... I'd also say that the development process has evolved some in that time, just not as far as it'd be good. It's a lot of hard work to get a community as grey-beardy as the PG community to evolve. Not impossible, but ...
> I don't want this to turn into a "Use GitHub/GitLab" post.
Personally I strongly dislike using either for nontrivial work. But: I still think we ought to accept PRs/MRs via one of the two, just to make it easier for newer contributors. But it isn't just my call...
> Let it be known that I actually think email is the superior way to communicate about patches, but the tooling around the mailing list could improve.
I suspect you'd actually have a hard time finding more than 2-3 people disagreeing with that notion. One of the problems is that many of us end up preferring to spend time hacking on postgres than on development-process tooling / integration....