Re: Last gasp

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On Wednesday, April 11, 2012 03:14:41 AM Robert Haas wrote:
>> My perception of what's going on here is dramatically different from
>> yours. I don't think there was any overflow of submissions for 9.2.
>> For the most part I would describe it as a slow and boring release
>> cycle, with the usual spike in half-baked submissions right near the
>> end, except this release they were less baked than usual, which is why
>> most of them didn't go in.

> They might have been half-baked. But several of those didn't get design-level
> review for several weeks which makes it rather hard to fully bake them in
> time...

But if they didn't already have design-level review, that means they
were not seen in any previous CF, which means they were not following
the expectation that nontrivial patches should be submitted earlier than
the last CF.

I think the key point here is that people have to expect that it's going
to take more than one round of review to land most nontrivial patches.
And we have to discourage the expectation that that can happen within
the last CF of a release cycle. If anything, the last CF has to be
tighter not looser than others on what we will accept, because there is
no time to recover if something proves wrong with a patch after a
month or three.

I keep coming back to the thought that we need more and shorter CFs,
and/or ReviewFests that are meant to help push WIP patches further
down the track. We need to make it easier to get those early reviews
done while there's still development time left.

regards, tom lane