On Mon, 17 May 2004, Mike Mascari wrote:
A quick google of "7.4 Win32 release" will reveal that the above was precisely what was said about 7.4: it would be released to not hold up important features like the IN optimization and a quick 7.5 would have Win32 and PITR. It's almost as if a cron job reposts this thread every 6 - 12 months. For those of us that are desirous of PITR, it's a 6 month reposting that is becoming painful to read...
k, let's think this through ... 7.4 was released, what, 6 months ago? And 6 months later, PITR still isn't ready? Is there some logic here that if 7.4 wasn't released, PITR would have been done any sooner?
Not being the author, I don't know. And in the case of PITR, the pre-7.4 author is different than the post-7.4 author. However, if I was personally responsible for holding up the release of a project due to a feature that I had vowed to complete, I would feel morally compelled to get it done. If I had then asked for, and was granted, an extra 15-30 days I would feel even more personally responsible and under greater pressure.
If, however, the project made the release without waiting, I would feel simultaneously relieved and possibly a little bitter. Possibly a little bitter in that either what I was working on wasn't perceived as sufficiently valuable to hold up a release for 15-30 days, or that my word regarding the completion status was insufficient for the project to trust me. Let me reiterate the words "possibly" and "little." But in open source projects, a developer willing to contribute hundreds, possibly thousands of hours of his own time is particularly invaluable.
I can tell you that, in economic models that have studied human behavior with respect to unemployment insurance, for example, the re-employment rates are clustered at the tails: when someone is first unemployed and when the insurance is about to expire. It's an inappropriate analogy because the project lives on from release to release, instead of having a drop-dead date at which point no future changes would be made ad infinitum, but it paints a useful picture. I'm willing to bet that CVS commit rates mirror the above behavior.
Unlike unemployment benefits, releasing the software without the feature essentially just extends the development period another 6 months, the work will intensify at the new perceived tails, and the process repeated. There are probably econometric papers that model the software development release cycle that could give quantitative arguments. I'm not arguing I'm right and your wrong, btw. I'm just pointing out some of the possibilities. In fact, for one developer it might be the "code production maximizing condition" to give them another 6 months and for another, creating the pressure associated with a 15-30 day extension where the world is standing still awaiting their patch...
Mike Mascari
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
