Re: 9.2 schedule

At the developer meeting last week:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting there was
an initial schedule for 9.2 hammered out and dutifully transcribed at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.2_Development_Plan , and
the one part I wasn't sure I had written down correctly I see Robert
already fixed.

There was a suggestion to add some publicity around the schedule for
this release. There's useful PR value to making it more obvious to
people that the main development plan is regular and time-based, even if
the release date itself isn't fixed. The right time to make an initial
announcement like that is "soon", particularly if a goal here is to get
more submitted into the first 9.2 CF coming in only a few weeks. Anyone
have changes to suggest before this starts working its way toward an
announcement?

The main parts of the discussion leading to changes from the 9.1
schedule, as I recall them, are:

-Shooting for a slightly earlier branch/initial 9.2 CommitFest in June
helps some with patch developer bit-rot, and may let developers who are
focused on new features be productive for more of the year. The
perception that new development is unwelcome between the final CF and
version release seems to have overshot a bit from its intention. It's
not the best period to chat on this list, with many people distracted by
release goals. But some people just aren't in the right position to
work on alpha/beta testing and stability work then, and the intention
was not to block them from doing something else if that's the case. (A
similar bit brought up during one of the patch prep talks is that review
is also welcome outside of a CF, which isn't really clear)

-The last CF of the release is tough to reschedule usefully due to
concerns about December/beginning of the year holidays.

-Given that work in August is particularly difficult to line up with
common summer schedules around the world, having the other >1 month gap
in the schedule go there makes sense.

As for why there aren't more changes, it's hard to argue that the 9.1
process was broken such that it needs heavy modification. There were a
large number of new features committed, people seem satisfied with the
quality of the result so far, and the schedule didn't go too far off the
rails. Outside of the manpower issues (which are serious), the sections
that strained the most against problems seem really hard to identify
with anything other than hindsight. The tension between "ship it" and
"make the release better" is a really fundamental one to software
development.

The two main ideas that pop up regularly, organizing more CommitFests or
making them shorter, are both hard to adopt without more active
volunteers working on review (both at the initial and committer level)
and an increase in available CF manager time. An idea I heard a couple
of people suggest is that it would take a CF manager focused exclusively
on the "patch chasing" parts of the role--not someone who is also trying
to develop, commit, or review during the CF--before this would be
feasible to consider. Some sort of relief for making that role less
demanding is needed here, before it's practical to schedule those even
more often.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 10:44:20PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> At the developer meeting last week:
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting there
> was an initial schedule for 9.2 hammered out and dutifully
> transcribed at
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.2_Development_Plan ,
> and the one part I wasn't sure I had written down correctly I see
> Robert already fixed.
>
> There was a suggestion to add some publicity around the schedule for
> this release.

Already started. :)

http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20110522

> There's useful PR value to making it more obvious to
> people that the main development plan is regular and time-based,
> even if the release date itself isn't fixed. The right time to make
> an initial announcement like that is "soon", particularly if a goal
> here is to get more submitted into the first 9.2 CF coming in only a
> few weeks. Anyone have changes to suggest before this starts
> working its way toward an announcement?

I thought we'd agreed on the timing for the first CF, and that I was
to announce it in the PostgreSQL Weekly News, so I did just that.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:33 AM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 10:44:20PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
>> At the developer meeting last week:
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting there
>> was an initial schedule for 9.2 hammered out and dutifully
>> transcribed at
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.2_Development_Plan ,
>> and the one part I wasn't sure I had written down correctly I see
>> Robert already fixed.
>>
>> There was a suggestion to add some publicity around the schedule for
>> this release.
>
> Already started. :)
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20110522
>
>> There's useful PR value to making it more obvious to
>> people that the main development plan is regular and time-based,
>> even if the release date itself isn't fixed.  The right time to make
>> an initial announcement like that is "soon", particularly if a goal
>> here is to get more submitted into the first 9.2 CF coming in only a
>> few weeks.  Anyone have changes to suggest before this starts
>> working its way toward an announcement?
>
> I thought we'd agreed on the timing for the first CF, and that I was
> to announce it in the PostgreSQL Weekly News, so I did just that.

We talked about doing a separate -announce post just for this item,
and there seemed to be some support for that. I'm OK with either way,
though.

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

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:54:19AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:33 AM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> > On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 10:44:20PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> >> At the developer meeting last week:
> >> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting there
> >> was an initial schedule for 9.2 hammered out and dutifully
> >> transcribed at
> >> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.2_Development_Plan ,
> >> and the one part I wasn't sure I had written down correctly I see
> >> Robert already fixed.
> >>
> >> There was a suggestion to add some publicity around the schedule for
> >> this release.
> >
> > Already started. :)
> >
> > http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20110522
> >
> >> There's useful PR value to making it more obvious to
> >> people that the main development plan is regular and time-based,
> >> even if the release date itself isn't fixed.  The right time to make
> >> an initial announcement like that is "soon", particularly if a goal
> >> here is to get more submitted into the first 9.2 CF coming in only a
> >> few weeks.  Anyone have changes to suggest before this starts
> >> working its way toward an announcement?
> >
> > I thought we'd agreed on the timing for the first CF, and that I was
> > to announce it in the PostgreSQL Weekly News, so I did just that.
>
> We talked about doing a separate -announce post just for this item,
> and there seemed to be some support for that. I'm OK with either way,
> though.

For what it's worth, I think there should also be a separate -announce
(and -general, and -hackers) post for the item. This is about getting
the message out early and broadly so people have the best chance of
getting it in time to act on it.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com
iCal: webcal://www.tripit.com/feed/ical/people/david74/tripit.ics

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David Fetter wrote:
> I thought we'd agreed on the timing for the first CF, and that I was
> to announce it in the PostgreSQL Weekly News, so I did just that.
>

Yes, and excellent. The other ideas were:

-Publish information about the full schedule to some of the more popular
mailing lists

-Link to this page more obviously from postgresql.org (fixed redirect
URL is probably the right approach) to "bless" it, and potentially
improve its search rank too.

The specific new problem being highlighted to work on here is that the
schedule and development process is actually quite good as open-source
projects go, but that fact isn't visible at all unless you're already on
the inside of the project.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us

Robert,

> -Publish information about the full schedule to some of the more popular
> mailing lists

I think that posting to pgsql-announce and PostgreSQL.org news, and this
list would be sufficient. I'm happy to take care of that.

> -Link to this page more obviously from postgresql.org (fixed redirect
> URL is probably the right approach) to "bless" it, and potentially
> improve its search rank too.

I would suggest instead adding a new page to postgresql.org/developer
which lists the development schedule, rather than linking to that wiki
page. Maybe on this page?

http://www.postgresql.org/developer/roadmap

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert,

Actually, you're responding to Greg, not me.

But +1 for your suggestions.

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

> Actually, you're responding to Greg, not me.

Sorry.

> But +1 for your suggestions.

Any objections before I post something? Greg?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com

On mån, 2011-05-23 at 22:44 -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> -Given that work in August is particularly difficult to line up with
> common summer schedules around the world, having the other >1 month
> gap in the schedule go there makes sense.

You might want to add a comment on the schedule page about the
June/July/August timing, because it looks like a typo, and the meeting
minutes are also inconsistent how they talk about June and July.

On 05/24/2011 05:03 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On mån, 2011-05-23 at 22:44 -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
>
>> -Given that work in August is particularly difficult to line up with
>> common summer schedules around the world, having the other>1 month
>> gap in the schedule go there makes sense.
>>
> You might want to add a comment on the schedule page about the
> June/July/August timing, because it looks like a typo, and the meeting
> minutes are also inconsistent how they talk about June and July.
>

Yes, I was planning to (and just did) circle back to the minutes to make
everything match up. It's now self-consistent, same dates as the
schedule, and explains the rationale better.

I'm not sure how to address the feeling of typo you have on the schedule
page beyond that.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us

On 05/24/2011 01:35 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> I would suggest instead adding a new page to postgresql.org/developer
> which lists the development schedule, rather than linking to that wiki
> page. Maybe on this page?
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/developer/roadmap
>

Now that I look at the roadmap page again, I think all that would really
be needed here is to tweak its wording a bit. If the description on
there of the link to the wiki looked like this:

General development information
A wiki page about various aspects of the PostgreSQL development
process, including detailed schedules and submission guidelines

I think that's enough info to keep there. Putting more information back
onto the main site when it can live happily on the wiki seems
counterproductive to me; if there's concerns about things like
vandalism, we can always lock the page. I could understand the argument
that "it looks more professional to have it on the main site", but
perception over function only goes so far for me.

The idea of adding a link back to the wiki from the
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/ page would complete being able to
navigate among the three major sites here, no matter which people
started at.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us