Re: Replication

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Conrad Lender<crlender(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On 23/06/09 03:44, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Gerry Reno<greno(at)verizon(dot)net> wrote:
>>> Londiste is beta.  The fact that Skype uses it is because it's part
>>> of Skytools which is their product.  They may want to run their own
>>> beta stuff. I don't.
>>
>> So, if they said it was general release, but it sucked, you'd try it,
>> but since they say it's beta, no way?  Wow.  Just wow.  The amount
>> of dumb in that sentence is not measurable with modern
>> instrumentation.
>
> To be fair, the "beta" label has been abused a lot in the last years;
> and what's more, it has been used as an excuse to refuse support (I'm
> looking at Google here). Another point would be that Skype has come
> under attack for using what basically amounts to a black box protocol in
> their main application - many security-minded people are sceptical of
> the company for this reason, and I can't blame them. That said, I do use
> pgbouncer, which is also a Skype project (released under the BSD
> license). After some casual code review I found it to be of good
> quality, and I'm now using it in production environments. I don't think
> it's so unreasonable to be questioning projects which are only available
> as "betas". There was a time when "beta" meant caveat emptor, this
> product is not fully tested, and if it breaks, we'd like to hear about
> it, but we won't be surprised. Trusting such a product with database
> replication may well work, but it's a risk not everybody's willing to take.

Beta or alpha or final or production, they all mean nothing unless
they are applied to a specific piece of code and it's rep. I've seen
plenty of software that was supposedly supported that was never fixed
or fixed at a leisurely pace (see mysql and packaging mistakes and
innodb order by desc bugs for examples). I've used "alpha" products
in limited, well tested roles in production that worked and worked
well. OpenSSL which I trust to do a good job, is 0.9. something right
now, which screams not "release" to me.

What makes code production worthy is that YOU have tested it
thoroughly and that YOU guarantee it to work or you'll fix it as long
as it's used in a way you can test for properly before upgrade /
update deployments. How fast do fixes come out? How well is it
maintained. An actively maintained beta may be a better answer in a
moving landscape because it can keep up. Beta means beta. And what
that means to an individual developer may not be what you expect it to
be. The risk is purely non-existent based on the naming of the
release IF IT'S BEEN TESTED PROPERLY.