I also thought the approach of your Russian developer was novel (forking on Github), although I wonder whether he planned on refactoring his fork to remove the specific EC2 requirements of the job you required done. I have a feeling it might not have been so easy for Ben if he’d been forced to wade through the AWS-specific aspects of the other Github fork.

My approach (for those of you following, I was the Australian developer) was to pull in Ben Schwarz’s repo, rip it to pieces for the purposes of fulfilling the requirements of the job you needed done, and then later extract the useful PostgreSQL bits out into a fresh fork of passenger-stack. This put Ben into the position of being able to blindly accept the patch, because I’d already put it into a pull-able state.

Like you said, this was an interesting experiment for all parties involved, and it’s great that other users of passenger-stack have been able to reap the benefits.

Cheers!

Nathan de Vries (@atnan)