Re: 9.5 release scheduling (was Re: logical column ordering)

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Quite. So, here's a new thread.
>
> MHO is that, although 9.4 has slipped more than any of us would like,
> 9.5 development launched right on time in August. So I don't see a
> good reason to postpone 9.5 release just because 9.4 has slipped.
> I think we should stick to the schedule agreed to in Ottawa last spring.
>
> Comments?

I'm fine with that, but in the spirit of playing the devil's advocate:

1. At the development meeting, Simon argued for the 5CF schedule for
this release, with CF5 not starting until February, as a way of making
sure that there was time after the release of 9.4 to get feedback from
actual users in time to do something about it for 9.5. If anything,
we're going to end up being significantly worse off in that regard
than we would have been, because we're releasing in late December
instead of early September; an extra month of time to get patches in
does not make up for a release that was delayed nearly three months.

2. It's not clear that we're going to have a particularly-impressive
list of major features for 9.5. So far we've got RLS and BRIN. I
expect that GROUPING SETS is far enough along that it should be
possible to get it in before development ends, and there are a few
performance patches pending (Andres's lwlock scalability patches,
Rahila's work on compressing full-page writes) that I think will
probably make the grade. But after that it seems to me that it gets
pretty thin on the ground. Are we going to bill commit timestamp
tracking - with replication node ID tracking as the real goal, despite
the name - as a major feature, or DDL deparsing if that goes in, as
major features? As useful as they may be for BDR, they don't strike
me as things we can publicize as major features independent of BDR.
And it's getting awfully late for any other major work that people are
thinking of to start showing up.

Now, against all that, if we don't get back on our usual release
schedule then (a) it will look like we're losing momentum, which I'm
actually afraid may be true rather than merely a perception, and (b)
people whose stuff did get in will have to wait longer to see it
released. So, I'm not sure waiting is any better. But there are
certainly some things not to like about where we are.

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