Re: SQL/JSON features for v15

On 8/23/22 11:08 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> At the end of the day, the RMT is going to have to take a call here.
>> It seems to me that Andres's concerns about code quality and lack of
>> comments are probably somewhat legitimate, and in particular I do not
>> think the use of subtransactions is a good idea. I also don't think
>> that trying to fix those problems or generally improve the code by
>> committing thousands of lines of new code in August when we're
>> targeting a release in September or October is necessarily a good
>> idea. But I'm also not in a position to say that the project is going
>> to be irreparably damaged if we just ship what we've got, perhaps
>> after fixing the most acute problems that we currently know about.
>
> The problem here is that this was going to be a headline new feature
> for v15. Shipping what apparently is only an alpha-quality implementation
> seems pretty problematic unless we advertise it as such, and that's
> not something we've done very much in the past.

With my user hat on, we have done this before -- if inadvertently -- but
agree it's not recommended nor a habit we should get into.

> As you say, we've delegated this sort of decision to the RMT, but
> if I were on the RMT I'd be voting to revert.

With RMT hat on,the RMT does have power of forced commit/revert in
absence of consensus through regular community processes[1]. We did
explicitly discuss at our meeting today if we were going to make the
decision right now. We decided that we would come back and set a
deadline on letting the community processes play out, otherwise we will
make the decision.

For decision deadline: if there is no community consensus by end of Aug
28, 2022 AoE, the RMT will make the decision. I know Andrew has been
prepping for the outcome of a revert -- this should give enough for
review and merge prior to a Beta 4 release (targeted for Sep 8). If
there is concern about that, the RMT can move up the decision timeframe.

Taking RMT hat off, if the outcome is "revert", I do want to ensure we
don't lose momentum on getting this into v16. I know a lot of time and
effort has gone into this featureset and it seems to be trending in the
right direction. We have a mixed history on reverts in terms of if/when
they are committed and I don't want to see that happen to these
features. I do think this will remain a headline feature even if we
delay it for v16.

I saw Andrew suggest that the controversial parts of the patchset may be
severable from some of the new functionality, so I would like to see
that proposal and if it is enough to overcome concerns.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Release_Management_Team