Re: Release planning (was: Re: Status report)

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> The big problem that I see with how this feature freeze/beta/release has
> gone down is that we have *alot* of big items that are/were being worked
> on (ARC, BGWriter, auto_vacuum, PITR, Nested Xacts), and only so much man
> power at the reviewer stage ... we *should* have frozen it all on June
> 1st, got the ready features out the door and released, and then
> concentrated on getting the "almost ready, but not quite" features into
> the next release as quickly as possible ...
>
> Hindsight is 20-20 ... maybe next time we'll learn from it?

True, 20-20. One thing is that you can't schedule assuming full
knowledge of the future, of course. For example, on May 1, I thought by
June 1 PITR and NT would be done, and that Win32 and tablespaces
wouldn't. What actually happened is that tablespaces made the deadline
(with June adjustments), NT is in but needs more work, and Win32 is
better off now than I thought it would be. And we don't know if PITR is
ready or not because we haven't studied it enough.

One problem with pushing 7.5 out June 1 and then coming back to these
features is losing momentum. Sure, ideally we could hit them all in
7.6, but realistically it is a lot harder to get things moving once you
stop. Look at the PITR patch we had for 7.3 (?) and are only now
getting it into the tree.

I am not saying we did things right or wrong --- just pointing out the
momentum issue.

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