Robert,
> absolutely not. this is a x style of development vs. y style of
> development discussion. many many projects, commercial and open source,
> use a style of releasing based on features included in a given version.
> In fact I'd be willing to say that the majority of open source projects
> work this way, since open source projects generally aren't beholden to
> release dates, giving developers the time they need to get specific
> features done and release them when they are ready. as i prefaced in my
> message, "history has shown us that waiting on specific features causes
> trouble with postgresql development", but that doesn't mean we should
> act as if this style of development doesn't exist.
Ah. I see what you mean. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The thing is, from the perspective of *current* Postgres users, 7.4 has
several "killer" features, some of which have been ready for 3 months. In
fact, I just finished sending an e-mail to a client advising them to try 7.4
as soon as it is tested, becuase of hashaggs.
So looked at from that perspective, our mistake was to try to cram too many
features into 7.4 ... more than could possibly get done in 6-8 months.
What's happening now is that the core group has decided, OK, we don't have
5-6 of the features we wanted to have, but we do have 10 other features, so
maybe it's time to release.
I'm not sure you're correct in the behaviour of the majoirty of OSS projects.
Certainly if the Mozilla or OpenOffice.org projects are attaching specific
release numbers to specific features, I haven't seen it. Linux does that, I
guess, but that does result in a 2-year span between major releases -- and
results in a lot of major features being included in "incremental" releases.
But I think most OSS projects just release when they think they have enough
tested features to justify a major release -- regardless of what those
features are.
Anybody here on other projects want to weigh in?
Me, I'd be in favor of releasing more frequently ... I felt that we waited too
long for 7.4.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco