Re: damage control mode

On Sunday 10 January 2010 01:38:07 Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
> > ... I don't see much sense in worrying about it now; the 2 weeks between
> > end of CF and Beta are when we need to be cut-throat. Given that this
> > time the "must-have" feature is already in the tree, I think you will
> > find people coming around quickly to the side of pushing things out
> > rather than fighting to get things in.
>
> I think the other Robert's main point is that getting to beta in only
> two weeks is ridiculously optimistic (which I'm afraid I agree with).
> I believe that what he's proposing is tossing enough stuff overboard
> so that we can finish the January CF in much less than a month, and
> thereby have more time for alpha-level testing and stabilization of
> the tree.
>

I agree with your summary, although I'm not sure it needs to be supported at
this point. While it hasn't been stated explicitly, I suspect most reviewers
will be reviewing with the idea of "is there any chance that this is ready for
commit" in the back of thier heads, and things that aren't will likely get
pushed off quickly.

> Now the other approach we could take is that we'll ship *something*
> on 7 Mar, even if it's less stable than what we've traditionally
> considered to be beta quality. I don't think that really helps
> much though; it just means we need more time in beta.
>

There are three reasons I'd probably be comfortable with that; 1) the CF
process means we've likely had more eyes on the code going in than in past
releases. 2) the alpha releases mean we should have already had more review
than in previous releases. 3) so far we're still looking good on pg_migrator,
which should make it easier for people to test the release once we get into
beta (which should help speed that cycle up).

But really if beta slips because we don't like the looks of our open issues
list, thats signicantly better than the last couple releases where we held
everything up just to get things into CVS months after feature freeze had
passed us by.

--
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com