Launching Babelfish Discussions, Wiki and more

By: Suprio Pal and Shard Gupta. On: Dec 12, 2023.

The Babelfish for PostgreSQL Open Source project has now completed two years and we are announcing a few changes in the organization and operations of this project. First of all, we would like to thank the many developers who have downloaded and used Babelfish and reported various issues and improvement suggestions. And, we expressly thank those members of the community who have contributed fixes and enhancements which have been incorporated in the code base. The Babelfish for PostgreSQL project wouldn’t have been the same without the many contributions from the community.

Babelfish is a community driven project and today we are pleased to announce some updates which will make it easy to communicate changes to the community in a timely manner as well as encourage active participation by community members in making improvements to help increase the reach and success of the Babelfish for PostgreSQL Open Source project.

First, our Documentation and Release notes will be moved to GitHub for improved maintainability and currency.

We are still in the process of migrating website contents to GitHub. We will remove most of the existing documentation from the website since it has been difficult to maintain currency and accuracy as we have been releasing many features and fixes as well as creating and updating documentation content for providing details about the various usage aspects of the project.

Secondly, we will open up GitHub Discussions which community members can use as a collaborative communication forum for question and answers in addition to opening issues, have open-ended conversations, and follow along on decisions affecting the Babelfish community’s current projects and future roadmap. We will use the GitHub Discussions as a forum for having technical design discussions and we want you (the community members) to be involved at all levels - big or small to make the design and final product better. The reason for using the GitHub Discussions forum for the above to support the vision of community involvement and progress, build transparency, trust and commitment which are essential to the success of this project.

And third, we will use the GitHub Issues as a mechanism to invite contributions from the community to work on open issues and share their contributions back to the Babelfish Open Source project. We will move a majority of the issues being tracked internally to GitHub Issues and tag them with up-for-grabs or help wanted. This list of tagged issues will include items that any community member can take ownership on and contribute to the project by submitting a PR. This list will include items for beginners (if it has the “first good issue” label) but not exclusively. There will be many others which are quite gnarly at the moment. Once the PR is review complete it will be merged into the code base by the project committers.

Thank you for your continued support and engagement with our project!