Re: [HACKERS] Daemon News article

On Sun, 30 May 1999, Tom Lane wrote:

> OK, I can't resist adding my two cents worth ...
> 
> "Henry B. Hotz" <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
> > I don't think Eric is claiming that a bazzar is ideal, just that there are
> > enormous advantages to going ahead and releasing code which isn't quite
> > done.  Once you have a good framework set up an awful lot of people can
> > help with the detail debugging.
> 
> Actually, I think we are closer to the bazaar model than you say; we
> just don't use some of the terminology that has been popularized by
> Linux etc.  For example, we *do* release current code --- anyone can
> pull the current sources from the CVS server, or grab a nightly
> snapshot.  And we do accept patches from anyone, subject to review by
> one or more of the "inner circle"; I doubt that Linus allows world
> write access on his kernel sources either ;-).
> 
> There is a difference in emphasis, which I think comes from the agreed
> need for *all* Postgres releases to be as stable as we can make them.
> But that's really not much more than a difference in naming conventions.
> Postgres major releases (6.4, 6.5, etc) seem to me to correspond to
> the start of a "stable version" series in the Linux scheme, whereas the
> current sources are always the equivalent of the "unstable version".
> We don't normally make very many releases in a "stable version" series,
> but that's partially due to having a strong emphasis on getting it right
> before the major release.  (Also, I believe that one focus of the new
> commercial-support effort will be on improving maintenance of past
> releases, ie, back-patching more bugs.)

Which pretty much sums up the *BSD model of development vs the Linux one
:)

Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org