Re: Summary and Plan for Hot Standby

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> Agreed. Believe me, I'd like to have this committed as much as everyone
> else. But once I do that, I'm also committing myself to fix all the
> remaining issues before the release. The criteria for committing is: is
> it good enough that we could release it tomorrow with no further
> changes? Nothing more, nothing less.

I agree with the criteria but I think their application to the present
set of facts is debatable. If the b-tree vacuum bug can cause
incorrect answers, then it is a bug and we have to fix it. But a
query getting canceled because it touches a lot of tables sounds more
like a limitation than an outright bug, and I'm not sure you should
feel like you're on the hook for that, especially if the problem can
be mitigated by adjusting settings. Of course, on the flip side, if
the problem is likely to occur frequently enough to make the whole
system unusable in practice, then maybe it does need to be fixed. I
don't know. It's not my place and I don't intend to question your
technical judgment on what does or does not need to be fixed, the
moreso since I haven't read or thought deeply about the latest patch.
I'm just throwing it out there.

The other problem is that we have another big patch sitting right
behind this one waiting for your attention as soon as you get this one
off your chest. I know Simon has said that he feels that the effort
to finish the HS and SR patches for 9/15 was somewhat of an artificial
deadline, but ISTM that with only 3 months remaining until the close
of the final CommitFest for this release, and two major patches to
merged, we're starting to get tight on time. Presumably there will be
problems with both patches that are discovered only after committing
them, and we need some time for those to shake out. If not enough of
that shaking out happens during the regular development cycle, it will
either prolong beta and therefore delay the release, or the release
will be buggy.

All that having been said, the possibility that I'm a pessimistic
worry-wort certainly can't be ruled out. :-)

...Robert