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From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org>,
	Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Release cycle length
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:42:31 -0800
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Cc: pgsql-www@postgresql.org,
	PostgreSQL Development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0311180329330.639-100000@peter.localdomain>
	<87smkmgyn7.fsf@mailbox.samurai.com>
	<20031117233828.Y731@ganymede.hub.org>
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Message-Id: <200311180942.31093.josh@agliodbs.com>

Guys,

I agree with Neil ... it's not the length of the development part of the 
cycle, it's the length of the beta testing.

I do think an online bug tracker (bugzilla or whatever) would help.   I also 
think that having a person in charge of "testing" would help as well ... no 
biggie, just someone whose duty it is to e-mail people in the community and 
ask about the results of testing, especially on the more obscure ports.  I 
think a few e-mail reminders would do a *lot* to speed things up.  But I'm 
not volunteering for this job; managing the release PR is "herding cats" 
enough!

I also contributed to the delays on this release because it took longer than I 
expected to get the "PR machinery" started.   We have a sort of system now, 
though, and the next release should be easier.

HOWEVER, a release cycle of *less than 6 months* would kill the advocacy vols 
if we wanted the same level of publicity.

I do support the idea of "dev" releases.   For example, if there was a "dev" 
release of PG+ARC as soon as Jan is done with it, I have one client would 
would be willing to test it against a simulated production load on pretty 
heavy-duty hardware.  

(Oddly enough, my problem in doing more testing myself is external to 
PostgreSQL; most of our apps are PHP apps and you can't compile PHP against 
two different versions of PostgreSQL on the same server.   Maybe with User 
Mode Linux I'll be able to do more testing now.)

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco