Feature freeze roadmap

Now that we are in feature freeze, I wanted to outline a few things
people can anticipate during this period.

First, you might notice I am trying to stick to a schedule and move the
process along as best as I can. It isn't that I want to be harsh, but
the community wants to get 8.3 released as soon as reasonable, so having
everyone moving forward in a coordinated fashion works best. You can
already see people asking questions about items in the patch queue, like
how to handle TOAST settings and the new XML functionality.

Second, we have a significant number of complex patches in the patch
queue, which is no surprise. A lot of people did a lot of coding for
8.3. The simple patches were applied weeks ago, so we are left with a
bundle of complex patches to review and apply. Many patches require us
to make decisions as a community, and do performance testing and
analysis. Much of the hard work is happening now rather than a month
ago because we know we have to do the difficult analysis now if we are
to move forward.

So, odds are the email lists are going to have many long threads as we
hammer out solutions to every one of the open issues, and we will just
keep chipping away at the patch queue until every item has been
addressed. I know the patch queue looks like we might never get through
it, but we always have, and will for 8.3 as well. So, for the next few
weeks, we will chip away and agonize over every decision until we have
8.3 ready for beta testing.

In addition, I have been thankful that a number of people who did not
complete changes requested by the community before feature freeze have
resurfaced and will supply new patch versions in the new few days. This
will allow us to complete these items, rather than adding another TODO
entry.

Frankly, one of the reasons we stop development during feature freeze
and beta is so we can focus our community energy on these issues. That
shift has already happened, and we are hammering out solutions. 8.3
promised to be a banner release because of it.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +