Re: Why is CF 2011-11 still listed as "In Progress"?

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote:
> On mån, 2012-01-16 at 22:00 -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
>> Adjusting that expectation is another side to pragmatism based on
>> recent history I think needs to be acknowledged, but is unlikely to be
>> improved on.  9.0 shipped on September 20.  9.1 shipped on September
>> 11.  If we say the last CF of each release is unlikely to wrap up
>> before early March each year, that's 6 months of "settling" time
>> between major feature freeze and release.  So far that seems to result
>> in stable releases to be proud of, on a predictable enough yearly
>> schedule.
>
> Well, has it?  I think, it took until version 9.1.2 to have a release
> without major issues that you could consider for production.  So do we
> need 8 or 10 months of settling time?  Or should we release earlier,
> realizing that we won't get proper testing before the final release
> anyway?  I don't know.

There's definitely some things that we're not going to catch until
after final release; after a certain point, settling doesn't help
much.  But the general pattern for the last few releases is that after
the end of the cycle we've done a sweep for open issues and found many
of them.  Early testing also tends to shake out a bunch of bugs in
whatever the new features are.  During the 9.0 cycle, it took until
June to clear that backlog; during the 9.1 cycle, it took until
sometime around June-July.  In both cases, a large percentage of those
issues were bugs introduced during the final CommitFest, because
that's when nearly all the big features hit.  If we froze the tree
today, we likely wouldn't need more than a month to put out a good
beta, but a month from now it'll take four or five months.  People
know when the end of the cycle is coming; just look at the number of
patches in the last CommitFest of any given cycle versus the earlier
ones.  We've been doing a pretty good job fielding it, but it isn't
perfect.

> Another concern is that we are now essentially freezing 9.2 features
> with at best about four weeks of production experience and feedback from
> 9.1.  I expect that this will also contribute to dragging out the
> finalization of 9.2 once more.

I don't believe that this really matters all that much; a lot of the
things we're fixing have been an issue for years.  Even for the
patches that are improving on 9.1 features (e.g. recv and apply sync
rep modes), I don't think this particular consideration is going to
hold things up.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company