Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 03:04:20PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> > On tor, 2009-08-27 at 09:58 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> >> To get positive results in which you can have confidence, you
> >> have to know that the testing which was done actually did a
> >> reasonably good job exercising the code in a way that would have
> >> flushed out bugs, had any been present.  That sounds a lot like
> >> the definition of a regression test suite.  Of course, we have
> >> that already, but it's nowhere near comprehensive.  Maybe we
> >> should be looking at an expanded test suite that runs on a time
> >> scale of hours rather than seconds. Actually, didn't Peter talk
> >> about something like this at PGCon?
> >
> > Let's look at it this way: If I were writing a compiler, then I
> > would have two main test approaches.  First, I would have an
> > in-tree test suite that compiles a bunch of example code snippets
> > and checks that the results are reasonable.  Call that a
> > regression test.  It would be informed by code coverage analysis
> > and previously reported bugs. Second, as part of my release
> > cycle, I would have an agenda to try to compile a large set of
> > real programs against my new compiler version. I would do that
> > during the beta period.  You will notice that GCC pretty much
> > operates that way.
> >
> > We have regression tests.  They could and should be expanded.
> >  That's a developer job, and we can start working on that now.
> >  But this discussion was about what to do during beta.  And I
> > think during beta you want to test PostgreSQL against a large set
> > of real applications. But we could try to clarify how to actually
> > do that in an organized way.
> >
> > Now, if you want to improve the regression tests, I would suggest
> > going through the commits since 8.4beta and since 8.4.0 final
> > release and ask how these problems could have been prevented or
> > caught earlier.  I suppose a test suite for WAL might be part of
> > the answer, but a closer analysis might be insightful.
>
> What I want to do is address the concern about too much of any given
> year being consumed by beta and CommitFest. I'm not sure I know how
> to do that though.

How about something in the alphas to the effect of,

Using PostgreSQL?
Have a development server to spare?
Try your application stack on alpha1!
We'd love to hear back. Functionality, performance, you name it.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
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