Re: 8.4 release planning

On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 12:47 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:

> How is that going to help? People will still write new code in the
> meanwhile and some of it may be better or more important than the
> stuff that doesn't get committed to 8.4. Artificially saying that
> nothing will be allowed for 8.5 that wasn't planned for 8.4 doesn't
> seem to me to solve anything.
>
> I think we've actually done a very fine job reviewing code for 8.4.

We have. This release has been better than any other release in recent
memory. We have had more reviewers, and a more transparent process. That
is a great thing and should only stand to improve for the next release.

> Take a look at how many patches were reviewed and committed. The
> problem is that we didn't review the big ones.

I am not sure this is entirely true. SE Postgres for example has been in
constant review by Bruce and Hot Standby has been in constant review by
Heikki.

I think specifically these two patches suffer from two very distinct
problems.

1. This community in general doesn't understand SE Linux/Postgres. It
also struggles with the very Linux centric nature of it.

2. Hot Standby has two very distinct problems of its own.

A. It is a very much buzzword compliant feature.

B. It *appears* to be very much in dynamic development. The chatter
on the list alone is enough to make conservative hackers very nervous.
Myself included.

I am personally not in favor of delaying 8.4. To me Hot Standby is patch
#8762. It isn't going to make the cut because of timing. That is life.
It will be one of the first in the queue for 8.5.

Or put another way. Nobody would blink about cutting the new \dfU stuff
in favor of getting 8.4 out on time. Why are we delaying for Hot
Standby?

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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