Re: 8.4 release planning (was Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Automatic view update rules)

> Simon has put a lot of time into Hot Standby and has followed the
> pseudo-defacto community process from design through what he believes to be
> near-completion; he can't be sure of completion until someone reviews his
> work.

I think this is a fair critique.

> Yet, albeit with almost no review from the committers, Simon has continually
> worked through testing, revising his patches, and requesting information and
> suggestions from the community.

There really was not a lot of review from mid-October through the end
of the year. That is partly because Simon was out of commission for
about three weeks and did not respond (in particular) to several
requests to separate ICfR from HS. That having been said, since this
is such an important feature to so many people, I think it would have
been better if more effort could have been put into doing what
additional reviewing was still possible. However, since the turn of
the year, it looks to me like Heikki has actually put quite a bit of
time into reviewing and responding to issues.

Still, I agree that if there's anything we should be putting our
effort into as a community right now, it's this feature. If we got
Hot Standby in the next release and everything else in the CommitFest
got bumped, I think a lot of people would consider that a good trade
(though probably not the authors of the patches that got bumped). For
example, I would much rather see Tom revert the updatable views patch
and work on this than spend the next week fixing updatable views.

At a minimum, I think the following patches from the CommitFest wiki
should be returned with feedback or rejected:

1. SE-PostgreSQL. We handled this one badly, but there's not enough
time to fix it now. 8.5.
2. rmgr hooks and contrib/rmgr_hook. Reject because Tom and Heikki
don't believe it's the right approach. Need better use cases.
3. Synchronous log-shipping replication. We handled this one well,
but it's not in good enough shape. 8.5.
4. pg_upgrade script. I haven't heard much about this in a while...
I am doubtful that it is production-quality, but maybe I'm wrong?
5. Reducing some DDL Locks to ShareLock. No activity in a long time,
no time to wait for this to be finished. 8.5.

...Robert