Re: 8.2 features status

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> writes:
> On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 09:37:32AM -0400, Jonah H. Harris wrote:
>> I agree. The real problem is that we don't look at things in a
>> business-like, "what are we going to have in the next release"
>> perspective. Being as it's an OSS community, we just see what patches
>> come in and we apply what we choose... then pick which ones we see as
>> "major features" and announce them.

> There's a fairly standard way of getting people to do things for you:
> pay them money. Thing is, people can run around making lists of thing
> that would be cool, but no-one can really force anyone to do anything.

> Now, there are the priveledged few who are being paid to work on
> postgres. If you can convince their employers to fund things on the
> list, it might help. Also, some stuff might work well as Google SoC
> projects...

Not to be unkind, but AFAIR all the unmet expectations in this release
cycle came from commercially-sponsored developers who said they'd do X
and then didn't finish it. I don't see that "taking a business-like
approach" would improve matters at all, even if there were a way for
the project to dictate to people what they should work on, which there
surely is not. Programmers are optimists by nature and will *always*
think they can accomplish more than really gets done (cf. The Mythical
Man-Month, still on target after all these years).

If you want an easy solution, here it is: *never* tell anyone that
feature X will be in the next release until it's actually committed
to CVS. (And maybe not then ... we've backed things out before.)
The only way there were any unmet expectations here were if people
failed to distinguish "someone is working on it" from "will be done
by 8.2 for sure".

regards, tom lane