Re: PostgreSQL 17 Release Management Team & Feature Freeze

On Mon, Apr 8, 2024 at 10:27 AM Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2024 at 9:26 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 6:50 PM Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
> > > And, as of the moment of typing this email, I get:
> > > =# select '2024-04-08 00:00-12:00' - now() as time_remaining;
> > > time_remaining
> > > -----------------
> > > 13:10:35.688134
> > > (1 row)
> > >
> > > So there is just a bit more than half a day remaining before the
> > > feature freeze is in effect.
> >
> > OK, so feature freeze is now in effect, then.
> >
> > In the future, let's use GMT for these deadlines. There have got to be
> > a lot more people who can easily understand when a certain GMT
> > timestamp falls in their local timezone than there are people who can
> > easily understand when a certain AOE timestamp falls in their local
> > timezone.
> >
> > And maybe we need to think of a way to further mitigate this crush of
> > last minute commits. e.g. In the last week, you can't have more
> > feature commits, or more lines of insertions in your commits, than you
> > did in the prior 3 weeks combined. I don't know. I think this mad rush
> > of last-minute commits is bad for the project.
>
> What if we pick the actual feature freeze time randomly? That is,
> starting on March 15th (or whenever but more than a week before), each
> night someone from RMT generates a random number between $current_day
> and April 8th. If the number matches $current_day, that day at
> midnight is the feature freeze.
>

Unfortunately many humans are hardwired towards procrastination and
last minute heroics (it's one reason why deadline driven development
works even though in the long run it tends to be bad practice), and
historically was one of the driving factors in why we started doing
commitfests in the first place (you should have seen the mad dash of
commits before we had that process), so ISTM that it's not completely
avoidable...

That said, are you suggesting that the feature freeze deadline be
random, and also held in secret by the RMT, only to be announced after
the freeze time has passed? This feels weird, but might apply enough
deadline related pressure while avoiding last minute shenanigans.

Robert Treat
https://xzilla.net