Re: 8.4 release planning

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> Put another way, the choice here is whether to have a half-baked delayed 8.4
>> release in 6 months or a polished on-time 8.5 release in 12 months. Either way
>> the feature ships and on a not terribly different timeline either.
>
> This is pretty much exactly how I see it. *Hot standby is not ready*,
> and committing it into 8.4 isn't going to magically make that better.
> The earliest we are going to have a HS feature that I would trust my
> data to is probably ten-twelve months off. The decision we need to
> make now is whether that release will be called 8.4 or 8.5; in the
> former case meaning that all the stuff already in 8.4 will not reach
> users' hands for close to a year more.

I'm not even so much worried about the stuff already in 8.4. I'm worried about
the queue for the first 8.5 commitfest. Nobody's going to be reviewing new
patches until 8.4 is out which will leave all that stuff sitting in limbo for
months. Worse, it'll take months to sort through it and nobody will be able to
work on anything which depends on stuff in that queue for, uh, 2*months.

This is stuff like sync replication, join removal, the posix_fadvise for WAL
replay, index-only scans, etc. If this stuff isn't ready to be committed until
next September we'll be back in the same boat again.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support!