Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 10:30 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> >>> Another solution would be to make major releases less frequent.
> >> That's not a solution and you know it.
> >
> > I do?
>
> Ok, here's the reasons it's not a solution:

> Per the above, it would not. It would make things worse. This has been
> true at every other OSS project I've seen documented (disastrously so
> with MySQL); there is no reason to believe that Postgres would be any
> different.
>
> I also do not see why you are so resistant to the idea of documenting a
> tracking the post-CF steps so that we can get more people on them.
>

I love how we all have the same arguments, every year, year after year.
So let me just throw in my proverbial two cents.

As I see it we can *NOT* increase our development time line. Open Source
just doesn't work that way. People want it, and want it now. Period. It
will alienate feature contributors and make us fodder for bad press
(blogs whatever) when we are lacking in some area where another isn't.

We can decrease our development cycle. We could do an Ubuntu (and
similarly Fedora) style cycle where people that want the hot new
features now, can. They would do this by using our 6 month releases,
while stable enterprises would use our LTS release. This is "kind of"
happening now with our new Alpha release status.

We can release annually and go all balls toward each release.

The second option seems to be the middle ground that we will settle on
regardless of what arguments are presented. The third option is what I
would like to see happen. Which means we would actually have a 9 month
development cycle/cutoff and a three month alpha/beta/release.

Joshua D. Drake
--
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