Re: 9.1 Beta

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> I've never understood why we timebox useful development, yet tweaking
> is allowed to go on without limit. Personally, I don't see the
> rationale to allow developers some kind of priority over their input.
> This tweaking period is essentially a time when insiders can put their
> votes in, but nobody else can. Beta is where we get feedback from a
> wider audience.

I think 9.0 got delayed quite a bit by the fact that we need
approximately 347 people to wrap a release, and they all had vacations
at different times over the summer. The code was pretty stable by
July 1; I think we could easily have released in August if we had a
slightly less awkward process for getting these things out the door.

> The sooner we declare Beta, the sooner people will test. Then we will
> have user feedback, bugs to fix etc.. Everybody is very clearly
> sitting idle. With a longer bug list we will make faster progress to
> release. We're just wasting time.

I can't resist observing that if you want beta to happen sooner, it
would be better not to commit major and largely unreviewed patches
three weeks after the end of the last CommitFest. Before you insist
that it was reviewed, the version that was actually committed bore so
little resemblance to the versions that were posted earlier that any
earlier review that was done was basically meaningless in terms of
ensuring that the final product was bug free, and it wasn't and isn't.
I complained *repeatedly* about the need to get both collation
support and sync rep finished and committed sooner, for exactly this
reason. We are now reaping the entirely predictable fruit of having
failed to make that happen. But for those two patches, we would
likely be in beta already, or darn close.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-12/msg01257.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg01209.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02811.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-02/msg00438.php

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company