One possible explanation could be that his contributions were casual and not very important. However, one of his commits was over 500 hundred lines of code, and consisted of a patch that affected the very internal parts of PostgreSQL. Why was a casual contributor making large commits and merging patches in PostgreSQL? If he had gained the right to make such bold commits, he probably had to be close to the core members of the project. But if he was close to the core, why did he do only six commits and disappeared afterwards? Moreover, there is no trace about his activities in any other mailing list or repository. Why was his activity so silent even though it was a large rewrite of one of the main parts of PostgreSQL?
This is easy to explain actually.
First, these commits were all in 1996. Of the developers that were there in 1996, only Bruce Momjian is still active. Note that almost all of the other commits nearby are made by Marc Fournier, who is currently playing no role in the project, other than hosting some stuff. He certainly does not follow the pgsql-hackers mailing list; he might well not have seen the discussion mentioning Julian. I can easily understand that Bruce no longer remembers a very casual developer 14 years ago -- he must have been looking after his recently born kids by then.
Second, these commits are all in the psql code, which is a small piece of the whole core code -- only the interactive terminal application, not the backend server.
Third, one of the commits (the one you link to) mentions Jolly incorporating some code prior to it. This must refer to Jolly Chen, one of the founders of Postgres95, the project that spawned PostgreSQL from Berkeley's POSTGRES. So it seems likely that Jolly and Julian had communicated during the Postgres95 time, before PostgreSQL's time, and this might have given him commit privileges in the early CVS PostgreSQL repository, and helped him produce a patch without much discussion in the mailing lists. Note that he says Jolly had integrated "part" of his patch previously; he already had this code sitting in his computer.
Fourth, the reason this is not publicly recorded is because PostgreSQL mailing list archives start later than that -- the archives (http://archives.postgresql.... ) start in Jan 1997. The older discussion probably happened in pg95-dev@ki.net for which there doesn't seem to be any public record.
It's just a minor rewrite of parts of the commandline client. Mostly made verbose by by renaming structs members / moving members around. 22+ years ago.
> but perhaps you operate on a different plane of excellence.
I work on PG close to full-time. So I sure hope I've many more contributions than that ;)
OK, well that's great that you contribute to/work on postgres, I have a lot of respect for that project and in general for low-level work like that rather than the product-level nonsense that I work on. But I still think you shouldn't publicly belittle any open source contributions, let alone ones on a project with such high standards for acceptance, and relatively high intellectual barrier to entry, as postgres.
"just a minor rewrite of parts of the commandline client. Mostly made verbose by by renaming structs members / moving members around."
People...really find learning programming hard. Many, many people, even if they try, won't manage to have the intellectual discipline to learn C to the level that you're disparaging. I'm pretty sure that you and I both agree that we shouldn't refer to someone else's hard work in that way.
I found it very interesting that Assange had made real contributions to postgres. I had thought he was a "hacker" in the sense of popular journalism (i.e. fuck knows that they mean but not a serious open source contributor). I don't know why you're criticizing the person who posted that interesting link.
People don't like to hear things that challenge their worldview. I have accepted this reality and don't let it get to me. I have accepted the burning of e-points i.e. "karma" as a sacrifice akin to standing by the side of the road warning others driving that the bridge is out ahead. They don't need to trust me, they only need to proceed with caution and ask questions themselves.
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=search...
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...
Edit: Added the one contribution he didn't commit himself.