postponing some large patches to 9.2

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Chris Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> wrote:
> It sure looks to me like there are going to be a bunch of items that,
> based on the recognized policies, need to get deferred to 9.2, and the
> prospects for Sync Rep getting into 9.1 don't look notably good to me.
>
> It's definitely readily arguable that fairness requires that:
>
>  - Items not committable by 2011-02-15 be deferred to the 2011-Next fest
>
>   There are around 25 items right now that are sitting with [Waiting
>   for Author] and [Returned with Feedback] statuses.  They largely seem
>   like pretty fair game for "next fest."
>
>  - Large items that weren't included in the 2010-11 fest be considered
>   problematic to try to integrate into 9.1
>
>   There sure seem to be some large items in the 2011-01 fest, which I
>   thought wasn't supposed to be the case.

This discussion reveals that it's time to start making some
discussions about what can be accomplished for 9.1 and what must be
postponed to 9.2. The big ones I think we should postpone are:

- Range Types. This is a large patch which was submitted for the
first time to the last CommitFest of the cycle, and the first version
that had no open TODO items was posted yesterday, three-quarters of
the way through that last CommitFest. Some good review has been done.
While more is probably needed, I think we should feel good about
what's been accomplished and mark this one Returned with Feedback.

- ALTER EXTENSION UPGRADE. This is another large patch which was
submitted for the first time to the last CommitFest of the cycle. The
prerequisite patch to provide basic extension support has not been
committed yet, although it sounds like that will happen soon.
However, since that patch is undergoing a fair amount of surgery, it's
reasonably certain that this will require significant rebasing. I
think it would also be an overstatement to say that we have consensus
on the design. My feeling is that, unless Tom thinks that failing to
get this committed now is going to leave us with a mess later, we
should mark this one Returned with Feedback and revisit it for 9.2.

- FOR KEY LOCK tables. This patch, unfortunately, has not gotten a
lot of review. But it's a major, potentially destabilizing change
that was, like the last two, submitted for the first time to the last
CommitFest of the cycle. Even if we assume for the sake of argument
that the code is unusually good for a feature of this type, I don't
think it's the right time to commit something like this. I would
argue for putting this off until 9.2, though preferably with a bit
more review than it's gotten so far.

The other remaining "big" patches are:

- extension support for pg_upgrade. Tom is planning to have this
committed within a day or so, per latest news.

- synchronous replication. Based on some looking at this today, I am
somewhat doubtful about the possibility of me or anyone else beating
this completely into shape in time for 9.2, unless we choose to extend
the deadline by several weeks. Simon said that he would have time to
finish this in the next two weeks, but, as noted, the CommitFest is
scheduled to be over in ONE week, and it looks to me like this is
still pretty rough. However, there's a lot of good stuff in here, and
I think it might be practical to get some portion of it committed even
if we can't agree on all of it. I recommend we give this one a little
more time to shake out before giving up on it.

- SQL/MED. This patch unfortunately kind of stalled for a long time.
However, I believe that Heikki is now working actively on the core
patch, so I'm hopeful for some activity here soon.

- Writeable CTEs. Tom has promised to look at this, but doesn't seem
to be in a hurry.

- Per-column collation. This one has been lingering for a long time.
But Noah Misch recently did a pretty thorough review, and it's now
marked Ready for Committer. Peter, are you planning to commit this?

- The PL/python extravaganza. I'm not really clear where we stand
with this. There are a lot of patches here.

There are a variety of smaller patches we need to make decisions
about, too. But summarizing all of that here is going to be too much.
I'll post to some of the other threads individually.

Thoughts on these?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company