Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:39 AM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On sön, 2009-08-23 at 09:37 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> To some degree, what this boils down to is that you can have
>> time-based releases or feature-based releases, but not both.
>
> Sure.  But some people are trying to introduce another subvariant: The
> conference-circuit-based releases. ;-)  It sounds attractive, but it
> shouldn't trump all other concerns.  Consider this instead:  Nothing to
> do during beta?  Write your conference slides! ;-)

Oh, gee, what am I speaking on? :-)

The main thing that I (can't speak for anyone else) like about getting
a release out in time for PGCon is that it happens at about the same
time every year, and I kind of like the idea of shooting for a yearly
cycle. I'd be just as happy to release every year on Christmas day,
but it's harder to get people to bundle a release around then.

> I suggest going with four commit fests.  Three is too short.  We already
> started the first one early, which didn't give those involved in the
> release any time to prepare some patches for it.  So with three fests
> you'd only give the major developers 8 weeks to code something for a
> yearly release.

Well, that's a good point, but 12 weeks out of a 14-month release
cycle is only marginally better than 8 weeks out of a 12-month release
cycle. If we really want to give people more time to write patches,
we need to figure out how to speed up the time from the end of the
last CommitFest until release.

One thing that I had thought of proposing is that we branch the tree
when we go to 8.5-beta and hold the first 8.6 CommitFest at that time
- or, failing that, that we hold a DontCommitFest at that time, where
we review all of the patches just as we would for a regular
CommitFest, but without the committing part. At least for 8.4, it
didn't seem like much was happening during beta, at least not much
that was discussed on -hackers or could be distributed across the
community.

I actually don't think that's the ideal solution, though. It's just
papering around the problem that the release takes too long and the
burden falls on too few people. But we haven't yet come up with any
good idea to address that problem.

At any rate, I'm OK with 4 CommitFests if that is the consensus, but
so far we only have 3 people weighing in on this thread, which is not
a consensus for anything.

...Robert