branching for 9.2devel

The recent and wide-ranging "formatting curmudgeons" thread included
suggestions by Tom and myself that we should consider branching the
tree immediately after beta1.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-04/msg01157.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-04/msg01162.php

This didn't get much commentary, but others have expressed support for
similar ideas in the past, so perhaps we should do it? Comments?

The other major issue discussed on the thread was as to how frequent
and how long CommitFests should be. I don't think we really came to a
consensus on that one. I think that's basically a trade-off: if we
make CommitFests more frequent and shorter, we can give people
feedback more quickly (but I'm not sure that problem is horribly bad
anyway - witness that there have been numerous reviews of WIP patches
in just the last few weeks while we've been pursuing beta hard) and
committers will have more time to work on their own projects, BUT the
rejection rate will go up, patch authors will get less help finishing
their work, it'll be harder to organize reviewers (see esp. the note
by Greg Smith in that regard), and there may be even more of a crush
at the end of the release cycle. On balance, I think I prefer the
current arrangement, though if we could make the CommitFests a bit
shorter I would certainly like that better. I don't know how to make
that happen without more reviewers, though.

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