Tom Lane wrote: > Bruce Momjian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Jan Wieck wrote: > >> I think in the future we have to force all large features, those that > >> probably need more than 6 months of development time, to be properly > >> #ifdef'd. Then it wouldn't be that big of a deal to release more often. > > > Alvaro started out with ifdef's but it got too confusing and we all > > agreed to just go with a normal patch. He just hits too much code. > > I think the same would be true of almost any really large feature --- > ifdefs all over the code base are just too much of a mess. > > To be honest I think that "releasing more often" isn't necessarily an > appropriate goal for the project anymore. Five or six years ago we were > doing a major (initdb-forcing) release every three or four months, and > that was appropriate at the time, but the project has matured and our > user population has changed. Look at how many people are still using > 7.2 or 7.3. One major release a year may be about right now, because > you can't get people to adopt new major revs faster than that anyway. > > Of course this all ties into the pain of having to dump/reload large > databases, and maybe if we had working pg_upgrade the adoption rate > would be faster, but I'm not at all sure of that. We're playing in > a different league now. Big installations tend to want to do > significant amounts of compatibility testing before they roll out > a new database version.
Totally agree. I think the only downside to a longer release cycle is that features developed would take longer to get out to the public. Perhaps we need to start thinking of add-ons to existing releases such as an ARC or vacuum-delay add-on to the 7.4.X release. The patch would potentially have to be recreated for every minor release. I would also like to see some psql message that shows the add-ons added to an official release. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
