Re: PostgreSQL 17 Release Management Team & Feature Freeze

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> writes:
> On 08/04/2024 16:43, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I was just about to pen an angry screed along the same lines.
>> The commit flux over the past couple days, and even the last
>> twelve hours, was flat-out ridiculous. These patches weren't
>> ready a week ago, and I doubt they were ready now.

> Can you elaborate, which patches you think were not ready? Let's make
> sure to capture any concrete concerns in the Open Items list.

[ shrug... ] There were fifty-some commits on the last day,
some of them quite large, and you want me to finger particular ones?
I can't even have read them all yet.

> Yeah, I should have done that sooner, but realistically, there's nothing
> like a looming deadline as a motivator. One idea to avoid the mad rush
> in the future would be to make the feature freeze deadline more
> progressive. For example:
> April 1: If you are still working on a feature that you still want to
> commit, you must explicitly flag it in the commitfest as "I plan to
> commit this very soon".
> April 4: You must give a short status update about anything that you
> haven't committed yet, with an explanation of how you plan to proceed
> with it.
> April 5-8: Mandatory daily status updates, explicit approval by the
> commitfest manager needed each day to continue working on it.
> April 8: Hard feature freeze deadline

> This would also give everyone more visibility, so that we're not all
> surprised by the last minute flood of commits.

Perhaps something like that could help, but it seems like a lot
of mechanism. I think the real problem is just that committers
need to re-orient their thinking a little. We must get *less*
willing to commit marginal patches, not more so, as the deadline
approaches.

regards, tom lane