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

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> What are you talking about? Are you suggesting Fujitsu's features are
> getting more attendtion than ARC for some political reason? You think
> nested transactions and tablespaces are just press release features?
> All those features are being developed by the community under community
> direction and based on community feedback/needs. How is that different
> from Afilias funding ARC?

No, the beef that Jan has, and that I also have, is that we put off the
release that was schedualed for June 1st in order to get Nested Xacts into
the tree ... hindsight being 20-20, we shouldn't have done that, but
should have delayed Nested Xacts for 7.6 ... there *were* enough features
in the tree to warrant a release, and features that ppl needed / wanted.

Do I believe there were political motivations for postponing the feature
freeze? Personally ... no. And I don't believe that the Press Release
(and a nice one at that) can really be counted as motivation for the
postponement, since the PR was done *after* we decided to push things back
a month ...

I do believe that there was some pressure from Futjitsu involved, in
postponing it, since they'd rather see it in sooner then later ... *but*
... I don't really believe that the pressure is any different then there
quite possibly could have been had, say, Jan been "almost finished" ARC
and Affilias wanted to see that sooner rather then later ... we all want
to see the feature we've either been working on, or funded, released as
soon as possible ...

The big problem that I see with how this feature freeze/beta/release has
gone down is that we have *alot* of big items that are/were being worked
on (ARC, BGWriter, auto_vacuum, PITR, Nested Xacts), and only so much man
power at the reviewer stage ... we *should* have frozen it all on June
1st, got the ready features out the door and released, and then
concentrated on getting the "almost ready, but not quite" features into
the next release as quickly as possible ...

Hindsight is 20-20 ... maybe next time we'll learn from it?

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