Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:15 PM, David Fetter<david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:02:31PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> >> That is a slightly alarmist.  Who are we going to lose these
>> >> users to?
>>
>> > Drizzle.  MySQL forks.  CouchDB.  Any database which has
>> > replication which you don't need a professional DBA to understand.
>> > Whether or not it works.
>>
>> You haven't explained why we'd lose such folk next year when we
>> haven't lost them already.  MySQL has had replication (or at least
>> has checked off the bullet point ;-)) for years.  I'd be seriously
>> surprised if any of the forks will offer significantly better
>> replication than is there now, so the competitive situation is not
>> changing in that regard.
>>
>> It is true that we're missing a chance to pull some folks away while
>> the situation on that side of the fence is so messy.  But I don't
>> see our situation getting worse because of that, just not getting
>> better.
>
> "Not getting better," isn't a situation to be dismissed lightly.  In
> FLOSS, as I've seen it, a project whose adoption isn't growing is
> dying.

You may be right, but I'm not sure that it has much to do with the
ostensible topic of this thread. The reason why these features have
not already been committed is because they are not done. The question
of why they are not done and/or why more people aren't working on them
has been asked and answered. Figuring out some concrete steps that we
can take to address those issues is probably a better use of time than
trying to define whether these features are really important or
really, really important.

...Robert