I’ll give you a chance to prove your words ;-P

#0: requesting an trac account.

#1: let’s cleanup the buildsystem !

* requiring _source_ of external packages (->xercesc) is crap. the whole way of importing xerces, too.
-> xerces should provide an proper .pc file and ingres’ build just query on it.
-> absolute library filenames (of external libs) should *never* be used.

* the lack of an automatic (non-interactive!) sequential build process is really, really bad for packagers.

* the whole installation process is a nightmare !

As long as vital issues like a clean build and installation process aren’t fixed yet, I really doubt Ingres will reach an wide usage in OSS world

Perhaps it’s wise to spend a few more resources on that instead of burning time w/ “certifying” java-abusing crap from people who don’t have the slightest idea of relational algebrabra ;-P

cu

In response to a mailing list missive from Sun’s John Plocer, http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-March/005174.html, IBM’s Ted Ts’o recently picked up on the same issue present in the Open Solaris community Sun was trying to foster:

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/19/what-sun-was-trying-to-do-with-open-solaris/

Ted later elaborated on distinctions between different open source, musing on the differences between “organic” and “non-organic” open source projects. Sun’s Open Solaris would be an example of the latter, attempting to transition from a project open in name only to one genuinely open with active community involvement.

Sadly, they seem to have stumbled with respect to successfully engaging with the development community and the result has been that Open Solaris has attracted limited amount of developer interest in participating in the Open Solaris project after three years.

Given the community contributor encouragement in the above post, Ingress seems to be making a similar attempt at moving from a non-organic open source project to an organic one. I applaud your efforts in this regard, but would caution you to learn from Sun’s MySQL and Open Solaris examples. Communities are difficult to create and require nurturing. Perusing the Ingres issue tracking, wiki, and source control systems, it is clear that the right steps are being made but that Ingress too has quite a ways to go.

In that, I wish you and your talented team the best of luck.

INGRES ROCKS!