On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM, Dimitri Fontaine <dfonta...@hi-media.com> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> I think feature freeze should be the beginning of the last CommitFest, >> not the end. > > So you still want 3 CF per cycle rather than 4? > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-12/msg02355.php > > 3 CF and a FixFest… -1 from me, if there's an open vote to be made here.
What I really want is for people to be able to get their patches and committed in a reasonably timely fashion. That means I'd like releases to be reasonably frequent - like annually - and I'd like the time for which nobody can get anything committed to be relatively short. Between the start of the last CommitFest for 8.4 and the first CommitFest for 8.5, 8 months went by. That is a darn long time, and I think it's hurting the project. It's certainly annoying me, if that counts for anything. It appeared to me that Hot Standby, Streaming Replication, and SE-PostgreSQL basically made no progress (or negative progress, in the case of the third one) during that time. While I don't want to venture too far into the realm of speculation, I believe that this may be partly because (1) there was no chance they'd get committed and (2) nobody was reviewing them and providing feedback. And I think there are a lot of other people who just didn't really start to get serious about finishing their patches until after they got some feedback from the July CommitFest - a lot of what got marked RWF in July got committed in September. I think those people were totally right to blow off trying to get anything done from whenever they wrote the patch until July, but I also think that it stinks that we ask people to work that way. And then there's the actual release schedule. Let's think about what will happen if 9.0 isn't released until September. First of all, patches that I wrote in February or March of 2009 will be show up in a released version 18 months later. That is quite a long time. Secondly, if the 9.1 cycle turns out to be the same length as the 9.0 cycle, then 9.1 will be released in November or December of 2011, which means that any patches I write now will wait almost 2 years to make a released version. That is a REALLY long time, and I'm skeptical that releasing around the holidays is going to be a success anyhow. Admittedly, this is all speculative - and just for the record, if we're able to put out a release in early July as we did for 8.4, I'll be quite happy. I understand that the majority of the community (or at least a majority of the vocal community) is not in favor of the relatively rigid time-based releases for which I am advocating. But I don't think I am alone in the above-stated frustrations, either. What I'd really like is to stop arguing about the number of CommitFests per cycle and the exact charter of each CommitFest and start talking about how we can create an environment where patch authors can get their work committed reasonably quickly (assuming it's good, of course) and released within some reasonable time frame after that (like, say, within a year from commit) - because I think those things are important to the health of the project, and even though FWIH things are much better than in pre-CommitFest days, I still think there's quite a bit of room for improvement. Any ideas? ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
