thoughts on v18 RMT

The v18 RMT [0] just had -- fingers crossed -- its last regular meeting.
Overall, things went smoothly, and it didn't require an enormous amount of
time, so I'd gladly volunteer for the v19 RMT. However, I still wanted to
jot down a few things while they are fresh in my mind:

* We met bi-weekly over video chat for a half hour and primarily discussed
the current set of open items [1]. It was uncommon to use the entire 30
minutes, but on the whole, this felt like a good frequency. If there was
some sort of crisis, we probably would've met more often.

* Hackers were responsive to communication from the RMT, so minimal nagging
was required. In a couple of cases, the RMT even helped solicit reviewers
for patches, and folks gladly stepped in to help. I was quite pleased with
the level of cooperation. For the most part, we were able to let the
regular community process take the lead.

* Despite the recommendation in the RMT wiki page [0], we did not
communicate with pgsql-release@ as much as we probably should have. One
specific thing that I'd advise future RMTs to do is to try to establish (or
pester pgsql-release@ to establish) the release dates a bit sooner so that
hackers have deadlines to work against. IMHO the informality and
flexibility of the process is nice, but some extra communication might help
prevent uncertainty.

* The lists of major features [2] and acknowledgments [3] were done
last-minute and weren't tracked by the RMT. As proposed elsewhere [4], I
think we should set a deadline of beta{2,3} for these and have the RMT
track them as open items. That means we'll also need to find volunteers
rather early in the process, perhaps around pgconf.dev time.

I've CC'd Tomas and Heikki here in case there is anything they want to add
or disagree with. Thanks everyone!

[0] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Release_Management_Team
[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_18_Open_Items
[2] http://postgr.es/c/b585f25
[3] http://postgr.es/c/142885d
[4] https://postgr.es/m/aMxeVgDW_0pfUBhi%40nathan

--
nathan