Re: [CORE] postpone next week's release

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 10:47:27PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
>> So, I think we have built up a lot of technical debt. And very little
>> effort has been made to fix that; and in the cases where people have the
>> reception has often been cool, because refactoring things obviously will
>> destabilize in the short term, even if it fixes problems in the long
>> term. I don't think that's sustainable.
>
> Agreed.

+1. Complexity has increased, and we are actually never at 100% sure
that a given bug fix does not have side effects on other things, hence
I think that a portion of this technical debt is the lack of
regression test coverage, for both existing features and platforms
(like Windows). The thing is that complexity has increased, but for
example for many features we lack test coverage, thinking mainly
replication-related stuff here. Of course we will never get to a level
of 100% of confidence with just the test coverage and the buildfarm,
but we should at least try to get closer to such a goal.

Those are things I am really willing to work on in the very short term
for what it's worth (of course not only that as
reviewing/refactoring/testing existing things is as well damn
important). Now improving the test coverage requires new
infrastructure, so those are new features, and that's perhaps not
dedicated to 9.5, except if we consider that this is part of this
technical debt accumulated among the years. Honestly I think it is.

>> We can't improve the situation by just delaying the 9.5 release or
>> something like that. We need to actively work on making the codebase
>> easier to understand and better tested. But that is actual development
>> work, and shouldn't happen at the tail end of a release.
>
> It should start right now, and then, once we are happy with our code, we
> can take periodic breaks to revisit the exact issues you describe. What
> I am saying is that we shouldn't wait until after 9.5 beta or after 9.5
> final, or after the next commitfest or whatever. We have already waited
> too long to do this.

Definitely.
--
Michael