Re: small but useful patches for text search

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert Haas escribió:
>> I don't even understand why we're interested in doing this.  If the
>> patches weren't important enough for someone to add them to the
>> CommitFest wiki in October, why are we delaying the release to hunt
>> for them in March?
> The problem is not patches that were not committed, but rather loose
> ends in patches that were.

There seems to be a reasonably well-maintained list of open items here:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_8.4_Open_Items

The only thing I can recall that is outstanding but not mentioned here
is the controversy over the behavior of the various \d commands. But
even that is something that can be changed after getting feedback from
beta-users and beta-testers, and we might even have a better idea what
to do about it at that point. Once we release, we're probably stuck
with whatever the behavior is at that point, but I think we've got
enough time between now and then that we don't need to get too worried
about it now.

Of course, if this list is radically incomplete, then it doesn't help
much, but does anyone think that's the case? My impression is that
most of the major open items (e.g. follow-on cleanup patch for
column-level permissions, Kevin Grittner's planner issues) were tied
up some time ago. If there are other outstanding issues, why can't
they just wait to 8.5? I guess I'm just confused as to how this
process works (I'm new around here?). As far as I can tell, the
committers are very careful about not committing stuff to the tree, so
that means that the tree pretty much always works and doesn't usually
contain too much that's half-baked. So it would seem like that would
make going to beta mostly a matter of finishing all the committing,
and maybe addressing the documentation issues mentioned on the open
items list linked above. I gather from Bruce's comments, and Tom's,
that there's more to it than that, but I'm sort of in the dark on the
details.

...Robert