Advice for Google Summer of Code Students (and other prospective contributors)

Periodically, someone whose name I've ever seen before contacts me -- or posts to pgsql-hackers -- to say that either (1) they've already written a great patch for PostgreSQL and they'd like to know how to get it committed or (2) they're interested in writing a patch to implement some major new feature in PostgreSQL.  Some of these people are prospective Google Summer of Code students, while others are researchers or other people who, for whatever reason, are interested in PostgreSQL.  I am always thrilled to see more people take an interest in PostgreSQL, but unfortunately I've seen a number of people who seemed very smart and promising crash and burn when in terms of actually making a successful contribution of code.  In fact, no matter how promising things seem at the outset, the failure rate - in my experience - is very close to 100%.

Google and our Documentation

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, trying to find pages in the PostgreSQL documentation using Google doesn't work very well: most often, one gets links to older versions.

A recent thread on pgsql-performance (somewhat off-topic for that mailing list, but that's where it was) suggested that perhaps we could use Google's canonical URL feature to work around this problem.

Another suggestion was that we ask people who link to our docs to link to http://postgresql.org/docs/current/ (or some sub-page) rather than linking to a specific version (e.g. the same URL with 8.4 in place of current). That way, as new versions come out, everyone's links will still be pointing at the latest version of the docs, helping the new versions accumulate "Google karma" more quickly than they would otherwise. Or at least, that's the idea: I have no idea whether it would actually work.