From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: PostgreSQL @ Sun
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Feature freeze progress report
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:04:25 -0700
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Heikki,

> We're having a short 8.3 cycle because we wanted to shift our release
> schedule from Autumn to Spring. That would get us back to releasing in
> Autumn.

Er, no.  We wanted to change the cycle to avoid having Feature Freeze occur at 
midsummer (N. hemisphere) when many of our committers are unavailable due to 
conferences or vacation.  

-----------

Question #559: Would changing version control systems help us on this at all?  
I'm specifically thinking of preventing bitrot; would using a decentralized 
VCS allow patch authors to easily prevent bitrot on their own?

-----------

I do like the idea of a web management interface for patches.  It has a number 
of additional advantages:

-- Advocacy volunteers would know what's under development and thus what they 
can talk about at user groups

-- Advanced users who are interested in a specific patch could download that 
patch early, test it for their own applications, and supply feedback to the 
community even before feature freeze.

-- A more organized queue would make backporting by the backports project 
easier.

-- We could save the patches by applied date and index them, and then have a 
place to point users when they ask: "When was X fixed?  Do I *have* to 
upgrade to 8.1 or just 8.0?"

-- It would make it easier to manage Google Summer of Code students and their 
work.

-- The status of a partially complete patch abandoned by its author would be 
much clearer and thus more likely to get picked up by someone else.

-- The patch manager could eventually be integrated with the Buildfarm to do 
automated patch testing.

Overall, I think this would be an excellent direction to move for 8.4.  As web 
applications go, it doesn't even sound hard; I think I could write it if I 
weren't on airplanes all the time.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco