Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Merlin Moncure [mailto:merlin(dot)moncure(at)rcsonline(dot)com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 12:45 PM
> To: Bruce Momjian
> Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Call for 7.5 feature completion
>
>
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Well, if Win32 doesn't complete by June 1, do we still do
> the feature
> > freeze? I don't want to be adding features after the
> freeze, that is
> [...]
> > As I remember, we decided that we should not make decisions
> to extend
> > the feature freeze date just before the freeze date because
> it causes
> > people to stop doing development, then we extend. I think we should
> go
> > another week or two then decide if we should stay to June
> 1, and if we
> > don't, we should schedule for July 1. Extending it by a week at a
> time,
> > and almost before the deadline, has caused considerable
> waste of time
> in
> > the past.
>
> I agree 100%. Right now the win32 side doesn't qualify for
> beta...just the date issue alone is a pretty big deal, IMO.
> There are pending
> patches for only about 50% of the outstanding issues. A tremendous
> amount of work has been done, but there is still quite a bit
> to be done to meet basic QC guidelines.
>
> So I suggest (my choices are of course subjective):
> Dividing
> win32 'should fix' (installer, /contrib, etc.)
> win32 'must fix' (psql query cancel, <1970 dates, non-cygwin
> regression)

About the date/time stuff. We (of course) had the exact same issues
with dates and times when we did a native port of 7.1.3. Since we want
to represent dates and times with exactness of nanoseconds from
thousands of years BC up to thousands of years in the future, it was a
major piece of work. The code base is not titanically large, but it was
pretty tricky getting it right.

First the bad news:
There is no native data type in the C lanaguage that can store with the
required precision so we used Moshier's Qfloat. With PostgreSQL,
perhaps the intermediate values could be stored in numeric type instead.

Now the worse news:
Everything is in C++ and represented as objects

Maybe it would not be too hard to translate the algorithms into C, since
the languages are fairly similar.

> Apply freeze date to the 'must fix' items. 'Should fix'
> items can be delayed until the beta, dot release, or beyond.
> My personal estimation on completion date depends on what
> gets put in which category. If everything is designated
> 'must fix', I think July 1 is practical.