You might remember that when we released 8.0, the plan was to have a 12-month development cycle for 8.1, unless there were Win32 problems that required complex fixes, in which case we would have a shorter 8.1 cycle.
Well the good news is that there have been almost no Win32 problems, but the other good news is that we are getting a lot of powerful features for 8.1 already:
o two-phase (Heikki Linnakangas, almost done) o multiple out function paramters (Tom, done) o bitmappted indexes (Tom, almost done) o shared row locks (Alvaro, almost done) o integrated auto-vacuum (Bruce) o buffer cache fixes for SMP (Tom, done)
It is possible all these items will be done by sometime in June. Now, if that happens, do we want to continue with the 12-month plan or shorten the 8.1 release cycle, perhaps targeting a release in the September/October timeframe?
The current core proposal is to do feature freeze on July 1, with the understanding that we will be done most of the items above by then and have the outstanding patches applied.
It seems to be a good idea to take the chance now to make a release. Delaying the release would mean preventing the wide usage of features although they appear production grade. OTOH, if feature freeze is delayed some seemingly essential features for 8.1 which might arise in the meantime might delay the release further, or induce late feature exclusion when some last minute issues are discovered. Integrated autovacuum seems good enough a reason to release early.
Regards, Andreas
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