FWIW I don't think any amount of process would have gotten multixact to not have the copious bugs it had. It was just too complex a patch, doing ugly things to parts too deeply linked to the inner guts of the server. We might have spared a few with some extra testing (such as the idiotic wraparound bugs, and perhaps the pg_upgrade problems), but most of the rest of it would have taken a real production load to notice -- which is exactly what happened.
(Of course, review from Tom might have unearthed many of these bugs before they hit final release, but we're saying we don't want to be dependent on Tom's review for every patch so that doesn't count.) Review is good, but (as history shows) some bugs can slip through even extensive review such as the one multixacts got from Noah and Andres. Had anyone put some real stress on the beta, we could have noticed some of these bugs much earlier. One of the problems we have is that our serious users don't seem to take the beta period seriously. All our users are too busy for that, it seems, and they expect that "somebody else will test the point-zero release", and that by the time it hits point-one or point-two it will be bug-free, which is quite clearly not the case. -- Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers