Re: Getting a move on for 8.2 beta

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>> My feeling is that we ought to bounce bitmap indexes and updatable views
>> as not being ready, accept all the contrib stuff, and try to get the
>> other items done in time for a beta at, say, the end of next week.

> I know there is a lot of "backend" work that has been done for 8.2 but
> the two features you are suggesting we bounce, are probably the most
> visible of marketable features we will have for this release. Especially
> updateable views.

Josh said nearly the same in core's discussion, but come now. The
updateable-view patch (in its current form) does not offer *one single
thing* you can't do today, indeed for many PG releases past; it just
saves writing out some tedious rules. If that's the most marketable
feature in 8.2 we're already in trouble. I don't think it is anyway.
Looking at the CVS logs I see

INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING
VALUES lists
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
pl/pgsql debugger (OK, not in core, but available)
restartable WAL recovery
constraint exclusion works on UPDATE/DELETE queries
multiple-argument aggregate functions
SQL2003-standard statistical aggregates
COPY (SELECT ...) TO ...
pg_dump selectivity options
customizable timezone names
GIN indexes
FILLFACTOR for indexes and tables

and that's just back to the beginning of July, so it probably represents
about a quarter of the work that's gone into 8.2, but I got tired of
reading the logs at that point.

We have this discussion every single release cycle: "hey, if we wait X
amount more time then we can have cool features Y and Z". But there's
always another X, Y, and Z. More importantly, this view ignores the
very real disadvantages of not getting already-finished cool features
A through W out to our users sooner.

regards, tom lane