Re: 8.4 release planning

On Thursday 29 January 2009 12:03:45 Robert Haas wrote:
> I
> don't believe that you can speed a project up much by adjusting the
> length of the release cycle, but it is *sometimes* possible to speed
> up a project by dividing up the work over more people.
>

This is interesting. We had a problem in 8.3 (and most of the releases before
that) of too many patches in the queue at the end of the development cycle.
Most everyone agreed that more reviewers/committers would help, but given no
way to conjure them up, they realized that wasn't a solution. Instead, we
went to a tighter development cycle, with one month of dev and then a
commifest. This allowed us to better parralelize both reviews and commits,
allowed a number of patches to get bumped through multiple fests with
relatively few compliants (after all, the next fest was just a month down the
line), keep the patch queue pretty manageable (right up untill the end, when
we stopped the cycle), and also delivered us some really big features along
the way.

--
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com