Re: Replication

On 23/06/09 03:44, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Gerry Reno<greno(at)verizon(dot)net> wrote:
>> Londiste is beta. The fact that Skype uses it is because it's part
>> of Skytools which is their product. They may want to run their own
>> beta stuff. I don't.
>
> So, if they said it was general release, but it sucked, you'd try it,
> but since they say it's beta, no way? Wow. Just wow. The amount
> of dumb in that sentence is not measurable with modern
> instrumentation.

To be fair, the "beta" label has been abused a lot in the last years;
and what's more, it has been used as an excuse to refuse support (I'm
looking at Google here). Another point would be that Skype has come
under attack for using what basically amounts to a black box protocol in
their main application - many security-minded people are sceptical of
the company for this reason, and I can't blame them. That said, I do use
pgbouncer, which is also a Skype project (released under the BSD
license). After some casual code review I found it to be of good
quality, and I'm now using it in production environments. I don't think
it's so unreasonable to be questioning projects which are only available
as "betas". There was a time when "beta" meant caveat emptor, this
product is not fully tested, and if it breaks, we'd like to hear about
it, but we won't be surprised. Trusting such a product with database
replication may well work, but it's a risk not everybody's willing to take.

- Conrad