Re: Releasing in September

On 20 January 2016 at 15:55, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>
> wrote:
> > On 2016-01-20 10:40:14 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >> We have gotten off of that cycle in the last two major releases, and
> >> this isn't going to improve as long as we have commitfests starting
> >> after January.
> >
> > I think this has very little to do with commitfest schedules, and much
> > more with the "early" forking of the new version branch. For both 9.4
> > and 9.5 we essentially spent a couple months twiddling our thumbs.
>
> It's certainly true that we twiddled our thumbs quite a bit about
> getting 9.5 ready to ship. However, the old process where nobody
> could get anything committed for six months out of the year blew
> chunks, too. Personally, I think that the solution is to cut off the
> last CommitFest a lot sooner, and then reopen the tree for the next
> release as soon as possible.

+1

> But this never works, because there are
> always patches we want to slip in late.
>

I haven't seen that in the last few years, apart from maybe JSONB. Our
views on the state of patches differ, mainly because we've not all reviewed
every patch, so its hard to say whether a commit has been brewing for ages
and is right, or not.

Some bad stuff happened in 9.3 and we were scared to release early. Let's
get back on track and release on time (Sept).

The main problem is the length of the integration phase, which is mostly
where nothing happens. We need to manage that process just as we do with
CFs.

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