Re: 8.4 release planning

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> writes:
>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> This is pretty much exactly how I see it. *Hot standby is not ready*,
>
>> So can you give us an idea of what parts of the code are in need of
>> rethinking etc? I assume you've looked at it now if you can estimate
>> it's going to take another 10 -12 months?
>
> No, I'm just estimating that based on the amount of design churn that's
> still going on according to the mailing list discussions.

That's, uh, not a very useful metric. It should argue in *favour* of the patch
being near completion that the patch is getting feedback and Simon is rapidly
taking such suggestions to heart and making changes responsively.

And incidentally most of the changes Heikki's been making have been
simplifications. Every bit which is simplified is one fewer area to find
further problems in. It's not like he's been finding problems which require
new code which in turn could have more problems.

> I haven't looked at the code at all. (If you expect me to sign off on it you
> can figure it'll be a couple of months even for that to happen...)

Well, given that you're basing your judgements on the mailing list traffic and
haven't read the code I guess we have to go on Heikki's judgement that there
are about two known weeks of work and possibly more afterwards.

The real question is how long will the beta period be with or without Hot
Standby? How many users have been pounding on it so far and how many more will
we get in beta?

If we assume it's about a month before the patch is committed, and then the
beta period is an extra month or two long (on top of what I assume will be
about a month) then we're looking at 3-4 months before 8.4 or about May.

I fear that 3-4 months will already be long enough to back up development on
8.5 and cause a big queue for the first commitfest. Frankly, at 3 months I
think feature freeze has _already_ gone on too long, I don't think we need the
doom scenario of 10-12 months before we create a serious problem again.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning