Re: Alpha release this week?

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> On 3/29/10 5:04 PM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> Last i heard from Dave on that topic is that there's no chance of that
>> happening that quickly. He's on a plane now but I'm sure he'll confirm
>> that when he lands.
>
> That means that we'll be doing the test-fest using Alpha4, materially.
> Which is annoying because it means we'll be catching a lot of bugs which
> are already fixed.  However, it's pretty much impossible for me to
> coordinate 25 volunteers getting the *same* daily snapshot.  And we need
> to test on Windows, since it has all kinds of special issues.
>
> I think my big goal for 9.1 is going to be to fix our testing procedure,
> or rather total lack of a procedure.  We've got development
> systematized, now it's time for testing.  I'm just sorry that the press
> of work kept me from really doing it this time around.
>
> I think we could be getting from alpha to beta in 6 weeks if we actually
> had a schedule and some real testing goals.

At the risk of being blunt, AFAICT, the delay in getting to beta has
little or nothing to do with testing and everything to do with the
fact that streaming replication got committed with a long list of open
items two months ago, and many of them haven't been fixed yet. Hot
Standby has a few warts too, but I think Simon has done a better job
cleaning up the loose ends there (with help from Tom and Heikki), no
doubt because he got it committed two months sooner than SR. From a
project management point of view, it seems to me that we shouldn't
commit major patches late in the release cycle unless someone has the
time to actually get them finished and stable. If Streaming
Replication were any other patch, we would have reverted it a month
ago. As it is, it looks like we're going to be waiting until Heikki
has time to deal with the issues, because it doesn't look like any of
the other committers are able/willing to help.

...Robert