Alpha4 release blockers (was Re: wrapping up this CommitFest)

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> I'm ok with closing things as of the end of the 15 days, say Thursday or
> Friday.

It might be a good idea to make a list of what we have left to do before
we can wrap an alpha. Here are some things on my list. Not all of them
are necessarily release blockers, but we need to discuss which ones are:

* Regression test failures from recent plpython patches. These are
affecting enough machines to make them "must fix before alpha", IMO.
There are some variations in error message wording, which are not too
terrible but also not exactly hard to fix. The python assert failure
that some Fedora machines are reporting is considerably more disturbing.

* Collation-related regression failure on buildfarm member pika. This
is clearly a bug we need to identify, but maybe we can ship the alpha
without a fix --- for one thing, getting more than one report of the
problem would be helpful.

* Collation-related changes still needed in contrib/citext. If we don't
have this done before alpha4, I'm afraid we'll have to generate a 1.1
update script to fix it for alpha4 users. I'd just as soon not deal
with that overhead.

* Rearrange pg_proc and pg_operator comments as suggested here:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-docs/2010-10/msg00041.php
While this isn't a "must fix", the very end of a development cycle
is clearly the best time for such a patch, since at any other time
there are going to be a larger number of pending patches that would
have to be adjusted. So I'd kind of like to get this done, if I can
spare a day for it.

* Generate alpha release notes. This is at least half a day's work
for somebody, I think, even with our fairly low standards for alpha
release notes.

There are other things I'd like to do, like review and perhaps commit
the btree_gist patch, but they're not at the level of "must fix".

Any other "must fix" items on people's minds?

regards, tom lane