Re: 8.3 Development Cycle

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> Bruce, Dave,
>> This will likely stop people from migrating to 8.2, but so what? It
>> isn't going to stop new users and existing users in real production
>> setting will likely wait for 8.3 anyway.

> And at this point most production users are only upgrading every 2-3
> releases anyway (something which will get worse with time).

The other side of that coin is that with a short devel cycle, 8.3 is
not necessarily going to look like a must-have upgrade to many people
either. If I were a DBA looking at the current plans, and I didn't have
a desperate need for bitmap indexes (a feature with a still very unclear
use-case footprint ...), I'd probably figure that updating to 8.2 soon
is a more rewarding strategy than waiting for 8.3. Known benefits now
versus unknown benefits later is a pretty easy call.

In the end, any one user is going to find particular updates compelling
or not based on specific features they need for their specific
application. We can't any longer expect that everyone's going to adopt
every release immediately ... indeed, that's why we're still supporting
back release branches.

regards, tom lane