Re: 8.4 release planning

On Monday 26 January 2009 15:13:56 dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org wrote:
> On 1/26/09, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> > All,
> >
> >>> 1) having the last CF on Nov. 1 was a mistake. That put us square in
> >>> the path of the US & Christian holidays during the critical integration
> >>> phase ..
> >>> which means we haven't really had 3 months of integration, we've had
> >>> *two*.
> >
> > Actually, I'm thinking about this again, and made a mistake about the
> > mistake. The *original plan* was that we were not going to accept any
> > new patches for Nov-CF. Just revised patches from eariler Fests. We
> > didn't stick to that, which is mostly why we are still reviewing now.
>
> I don't recall us discussing that, but it sounds like it might help next
> cycle.
>

What would be the significance of opening up the tree to future development
between the last commitfest and last commitfest -1, if no new patches could
be introduced?

Essentially this is where we are at now... November commit fest finished,
December we "re-opened" for development, and we're in the January commitfest
where no new features have been accepted.

The problem is what to do when we get to the end of the commit fests, and we
have a few reamining (invariably large/complex) patches that people don't
want to push.

I had been leaning toward the idea of pushing the 8.4 release back six months,
but reopening development for 2-3 more development/commitfest cycles, but I
am starting to think this is moving things in the wrong direction.

Now I am starting to think that we cannot prevent large patches from showing
up at the end of a cycle no matter what, and the only way to really "solve"
that problem is to lesson the pain of getting bumped from a release. Ie.
instead of being bump meaning you must wait 12-14 months till next release,
we move toward more of a 6 month cycle of development. I'm not sure it's
feasible to boil down beta/rc phase to two months, tough it seems possible if
we were strict about bumping features that aren't ready, and if our
development cycles only went 4 months. For end users who are concerned about
continuous upgrading, we might think about putting restrictions on every
other release (ie. require binary or data file level compatability with 8.4
for the 8.5 release, and remove that restriction for 8.6) to lesson the
upgrade path. (alternativly, a working IPU plan could make that less of an
issue)

--
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com