Re: [CORE] Restore-reliability mode

On 2015-06-03 10:21:28 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> So, historically, this is what the period between feature freeze and
> beta1 was for; the "consolidation" phase was supposed to deal with this.
> The problem over the last few years, by my observation, has been that
> consolidation has been left to just a few people (usually just Bruce &
> Tom or Tom & Robert) and our code base is now much to large for that.
>
> The way other projects deal with this is having continuous testing as
> stuff comes in, and *more* testing that just our regression tests (e.g.
> acceptance tests, integration tests, performance tests, etc.). So our
> other issue has been that our code complexity has been growing faster
> than our test suite. Part of that is that this community has never
> placed much value in automated testing or testers, so people who are
> interested in it find other projects to contribute to.
>
> I would argue that if we delay 9.5 in order to do a 100% manual review
> of code, without adding any new automated tests or other non-manual
> tools for improving stability, then it's a waste of time; we might as
> well just release the beta, and our users will find more issues than we
> will. I am concerned that if we declare a cleanup period, especially in
> the middle of the summer, all that will happen is that the project will
> go to sleep for an extra three months.
>
> I will also point out that there is a major adoption cost to delaying
> 9.5. Right now users are excited about UPSERT, big data, and extra
> JSON features. If they have to wait another 7 months, they'll be a lot
> less excited, and we'll lose more potential users to the new databases
> and the MySQL forks. It could also delay the BDR project (Simon/Craig
> can speak to this) which would suck.
>
> Reliability of having a release every year is important as well as
> database reliability ... and for a lot of the new webdev generation,
> PostgreSQL is already the most reliable piece of software infrastructure
> they use. So if we're going to have a cleanup delay, then let's please
> make it an *intensive* cleanup delay, with specific goals, milestones,
> and a schedule. Otherwise, don't bother.

+very many