Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Stephen Frost<sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> I agree entirely with Andrew here- what we need are a set of users who
> would be willing to run their actual applications against a beta release
> in a testing environment.  The Beta-Mom position would be working with
> some list of users who've volunteered to do that; prodding them when a
> new beta comes out, poking them for feedback, working with them on
> issues they run into, etc.

I don't think we need the Beta-Mom to work with them on issues they
run into. We want to hear those things on the mailing lists.

But I do think the idea of having someone being Beta-Mom is a good
idea because of this simple point: right now we don't know if we have
any beta testers. All we hear about is when they run into problems.
What we want to know is how many people have run their applications
and *not* had problems.

So I see the Beta-Mom as being in charge of:

Gathering a list of volunteers willing to report results
For each volunteer getting a list of features they tested
For each volunteer getting a "yay" or "nay" report

Ideally we would want to know that people have run their application
frameworks for a certain length of time, with slave databases set up,
with slony set up, tested failover, with various pluggable langauges,
with various contrib modules, with large objects, with full text
search, etc.

Once we have a reasonable number of positive reports covering a wide
range of heavy-duty configuration then we can start to base our
confidence with going ahead with a release on those positive reports
rather than simply on the amount of time that's passed without a
problem.

--
greg
http://mit.edu/~gsstark/resume.pdf