Re: Plan for feature freeze?

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Neil Conway wrote:
>>On 30-Apr-04, at 8:53 PM, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
>>>For me even September 1st does not seem too late. Major version up
>>>bring users pains including backup/restore application
>>>imcompatibilty... IMO to justify those pains we need to give users
>>>major enhancements. Honestly I don't understand why we should rush the
>>>major version up.
>>
>>Yeah, I completely agree. I think a feature freeze date of August or
>>September is definitely worth considering.
>
> Tatsuo brought up the an excellent point (that I have been saying for a
> long time), that the number of must-fix bugs from previous releases is
> shrinking, and the complexity of new features is increasing.
>
> This dictates the that length of our release process should lengthen
> over time.

I agree with this line of thought.

However, perhaps *some* of any increase in development time could be
made up by changing how the beta period is handled. In the last two
major releases (and possibly earlier ones also), beta lasted much longer
than people seemed to think it would/should. Remember this thread from
last summer:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2003-07/msg00285.php
There was discussion regarding a release around September 1. When did we
actually release? Mid-November.

So that made the 7.4 cycle about 7.5 months of development (2002-11-27
to 2003-07-15 or thereabouts), and 4 months of beta (2003-07-15 to
2003-11-17). I personally think our goal ought to be something like 9 to
12 months of development, followed by 2 to 3 months of beta.

Joe