Re: Release planning (was: Re: Status report)

Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> Jan Wieck wrote:
>> I think in the future we have to force all large features, those that
>> probably need more than 6 months of development time, to be properly
>> #ifdef'd. Then it wouldn't be that big of a deal to release more often.

> Alvaro started out with ifdef's but it got too confusing and we all
> agreed to just go with a normal patch. He just hits too much code.

I think the same would be true of almost any really large feature ---
ifdefs all over the code base are just too much of a mess.

To be honest I think that "releasing more often" isn't necessarily an
appropriate goal for the project anymore. Five or six years ago we were
doing a major (initdb-forcing) release every three or four months, and
that was appropriate at the time, but the project has matured and our
user population has changed. Look at how many people are still using
7.2 or 7.3. One major release a year may be about right now, because
you can't get people to adopt new major revs faster than that anyway.

Of course this all ties into the pain of having to dump/reload large
databases, and maybe if we had working pg_upgrade the adoption rate
would be faster, but I'm not at all sure of that. We're playing in
a different league now. Big installations tend to want to do
significant amounts of compatibility testing before they roll out
a new database version.

regards, tom lane