Re: 8.4 release planning

On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 11:36 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> All,
>
> So, some feedback to make this decision more difficult:
>
> Users: care about HS more than anything else in the world. I'm
> convinced that if we took a staw poll, 80% of our users would be in
> favor of waiting for HS. This one feature will make more of a
> difference in the number of PG users than any feature since the Windows
> port. Maybe more.

Maybe. Most of the people I talk to are more interested in Recursive
Queries and Parallel restore. Not that they don't see the benefit of HS
of course just that they already have in place solutions for that
problem.

>
> on the other hand:
>
> We held back version 4 months 7.4 for Windows, before it became apparent
> that there was at least a year more work to do. That was a mistake, and
> in many ways HS seems like a similar case.

Had to read this twice. I think you mean we held back 7.4 four 4 months.
Which I had actually forgotten.

> SE-Linux: this patch has effectively been in development for 2 years
> ourside the core process before putting it in; the forked SEPostgres is
> in use in production. KaiGai has been available for 20 hours a week (or
> more) to troubleshoot issues and change APIs. I really don't see what
> the problem is with committing it.

As I posted earlier I think it is mostly understanding of the
technology.

>
> pg_upgrade hasn't recieved a lot of testing because 8.4 has been such a
> moving target. I've been waiting for it to settle down so that we can
> see if upgrade works. It was always true that pg_upgrade would be among
> the last patches tested; we discussed this at pgCon.
>

I thought pg_upgrade was dead. I am happy to hear it isn't. When can we
see a patch that works on anything?

>
> 1) having the last CF on Nov. 1 was a mistake. That put us square in
> the path of the US & Christian holidays during the critical integration
> phase .. which means we haven't really had 3 months of integration,
> we've had *two*.
>

Its always something though. Its either Christmas or summer or school
starting or school ending or spring break etc...

> Better technology would also help, such as automated tracking of patch
> changes and when the last time a reviewer spoke up was. Currently, Dave
> and I have been doing these things by hand and I know we missed a lot of
> patches which stalled. But the main issue is (and will remain) people
> and procrastination.
>

Nod.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

> --Josh
>
>
>
>
--
PostgreSQL - XMPP: jdrake(at)jabber(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Consulting, Development, Support, Training
503-667-4564 - http://www.commandprompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company, serving since 1997