Re: Why is CF 2011-11 still listed as "In Progress"?

On 01/16/2012 02:42 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> But, I've noticed that nothing good comes of me pressing my own view
> too hard. Either we as a community value having the CommitFest wrap
> up in a reasonable period of time, or we don't. If we do, then let's
> make it happen together. If we don't, then let's resign ourselves now
> to the fact that 9.2 will not hit the shelves for a very long time.

I think this is getting more predictable simply based on having some
history. The trail blazing you led here for some time didn't know what
was and wasn't possible yet. I feel that the basic shape of things,
while still fuzzy in spots, is a lot more clear now.

We need to have schedule goals. There needs to be a date where we
switch toward a more aggressive "is someone going to commit this soon?"
stance on things that are still open. At that point, someone needs to
be the person not afraid to ramp up pressure toward returning things
that just aren't going to make it to commit quality. That's a thankless
task that rarely leaves anyone involved happy.

But this project won't easily move to "ship on this date" instead of
"ship when it's ready", and I don't want that to change. There's two
sides to that. The quality control on most of the 100% date driven
release software I use is terrible. The way the CF schedule is lined up
now, there's enough margin in the schedule that we can handle some drift
there, while still keeping the quality standards high. The currently
open CF is probably going to take at least 6 weeks. That doesn't change
the fact that hard decisions about return vs. continue toward possible
commit should be accelerating by or before the 4 week mark.

The other side to this is that when some big and/or hard features land
does impact PostgreSQL's adoption. To close some of them, you almost
need the sort of focus that only seems to come from recognizing you're
past the original goal date, this one big thing is holding up forward
progress, and everyone who can should be pushing on that usefully to
wrap it up. Could the last 9.1 CF have closed up 1 to 2 weeks earlier
if Sync Rep had been bumped? Probably. Was it worth going off-schedule
by that much so that it did ship in 9.1? I think so. But with every
day marching past the original goal, the thinking should turn toward
what simplified subset is commit quality. If there's not a scaled down
feature some trimming might extract and get to commit quality--which was
the case with how Sync Rep ended up being committed--that one needs to
close. The couple of weeks over target 9.1 slipped is as bad as we can
let this go now.

I made one big mistake for 2011-11 CF I want to learn how to avoid next
time. When we went past the schedule goal--closing on 12/15--I got most
of the patches closed out. What I should have done at that point is
push toward alpha3 release, even though there were ~5 things still
open. The fact that some patches in that CF are still being tinkered
with shouldn't delay a date-driven alpha drop.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com