Re: Assisting developers

Chris, all:

> Well, I note (and I'm not being unkind or anything here) that a lot of
> the high level committers we have haven't been so active this release.
> Peter and Joe haven't been around much and Jan has been busy with Slony.
> We also lost Thomas Lockhart. Neil's also away on holidays. You and
> Tom have basically been doing all the reviewing - a great job - but I
> can't believe Tom hasn't cracked yet :P

Actually, this is a *big* part of the problem. In 7.3, by unplanned
circumstance, we got into a cycle of doing feature freeze and starting beta
during the summer. This is a bad cycle -- the Europeans take their 3-week
vacations, the Americans go to (and spend many hours preparing for) a bunch
of conventions, Students go to internships, people take long weekends, get
married, etc. ( This is probably why many American corporations end their
fiscal year in midsummer; nothing is going to get done anyway, might as well
clean up. )

The result is that we chronically have less manpower when just when we need
everybody. And some of us end up spending 11 hours a day in front of the
screen when we should be outside soaking up Vitamin D.

Therefore, I propose that the next version either feature freeze in March or
in October, but NOT in May-August. Which we do -- March or October -- can be
based on an evaluation of the outstanding post-7.5 patches in January.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco