Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

Rod Taylor wrote:
> > Do we have any "killer" features added to 7.4 that we can shout about?
> > There's usually been one or two in the past...?
>
> A quick glance at the TODO list shows a number of speed improvements in
> specific areas (IN, GROUP BY, Subselects in views), ARRAY improvements,
> some utility command improvements / additions, and a significant
> protocol update.
>
> The protocol update may not be flashy, but it is a large step forward in
> presenting a clean experience for developers using PostgreSQL (reduces
> chance of rare, unexpected, and difficult to find logic errors).
>
> If nothing else, it makes for an excellent cleanup release that rounds
> off some of the sharp corners (tab completion for schema elements in
> psql, schema dump in psql, fixed cluster support, transactional
> truncate, alter sequence, new regex code for fast MultiByte, etc).

The problem with cleanup releases is that most of our recent releases
have been of that type. Each release is a good step forward, but I was
hoping for a set of killer features for this release.

Tom said that our low-hanging fruit is gone and only hard items are
left. This is certainly true. What is hard to accept is that those big
items take _weeks_ of focused development, and we just don't have enough
full-time developers who can spend that amount of time to do them. The
sad truth is that there is alway something _else_ to do, rather than
block out weeks to code a complex feature. And these are usually
features that can't be done incrementally, but require a huge input of
time before there is any payback.

I tried with Win32, and spent a few weeks getting us closer, but my
other work of housecleaning (email/patches/cleanup), and marketing
(speaking and tutorial preparation) just make it impossible to spend the
time needed to complete a big item. And people were rightly upset that
the patches weren't getting applied or cleanup done in a timely manner.

It is depressing.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
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