a few thoughts on the schedule

Hi,

It's pretty clear that the impending feature freeze proposed by core
has spurred a lot of activity. This is both good and bad. On the
good side, we're getting a bunch of stuff done. On the bad side,
there is inevitably going to be a temptation to rush things in that
are really not quite fully-baked just yet. If we fail to resist that
temptation, we WILL pay the consequences. Those consequences may
include overt bugs (as per the recent discussion on what went wrong
with multi-xacts) or bad design decisions from which we will not
easily be able to disentangle ourselves.

I am already concerned about some of the commits that have gone in
very recently, particularly these:

- Map basebackup tablespaces using a tablespace_map file - Discussion
on pgsql-committers suggests that this may have some scary problems.
Maybe I just don't understand the situation.
- Allow on-the-fly capture of DDL event details - This looks really
half-baked to me. At the least, the documentation expresses an
optimism about what can be done with a pg_ddl_command that isn't
realized by the code.
- Code review for foreign/custom join pushdown patch - Whacks around
my earlier commit without agreement or adequate discussion, apparently
on the theory that Tom always knows best.
- Add support for INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING/UPDATE - Huge
feature introducing novel infrastructure.

We also need to start thinking about what happens after feature
freeze. The CommitFest application currently lists a 2015-06
CommitFest which, according to previous practice, would be expected to
start on the 15th of the month. Given where we are now, that seems
entirely unrealistic. I am doubtful that we will be ready to ship a
beta by mid-June, let alone begin a new development cycle.

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