Re: Release planning (was: Re: Status report)

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > Jan Wieck wrote:
> >> I think in the future we have to force all large features, those that
> >> probably need more than 6 months of development time, to be properly
> >> #ifdef'd. Then it wouldn't be that big of a deal to release more often.
>
> > Alvaro started out with ifdef's but it got too confusing and we all
> > agreed to just go with a normal patch. He just hits too much code.
>
> I think the same would be true of almost any really large feature ---
> ifdefs all over the code base are just too much of a mess.
>
> To be honest I think that "releasing more often" isn't necessarily an
> appropriate goal for the project anymore. Five or six years ago we were
> doing a major (initdb-forcing) release every three or four months, and
> that was appropriate at the time, but the project has matured and our
> user population has changed. Look at how many people are still using
> 7.2 or 7.3. One major release a year may be about right now, because
> you can't get people to adopt new major revs faster than that anyway.
>
> Of course this all ties into the pain of having to dump/reload large
> databases, and maybe if we had working pg_upgrade the adoption rate
> would be faster, but I'm not at all sure of that. We're playing in
> a different league now. Big installations tend to want to do
> significant amounts of compatibility testing before they roll out
> a new database version.

Totally agree.

I think the only downside to a longer release cycle is that features
developed would take longer to get out to the public. Perhaps we need
to start thinking of add-ons to existing releases such as an ARC or
vacuum-delay add-on to the 7.4.X release. The patch would potentially
have to be recreated for every minor release. I would also like to see
some psql message that shows the add-ons added to an official release.

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