Guys,
I agree with Neil ... it's not the length of the development part of the
cycle, it's the length of the beta testing.
I do think an online bug tracker (bugzilla or whatever) would help. I also
think that having a person in charge of "testing" would help as well ... no
biggie, just someone whose duty it is to e-mail people in the community and
ask about the results of testing, especially on the more obscure ports. I
think a few e-mail reminders would do a *lot* to speed things up. But I'm
not volunteering for this job; managing the release PR is "herding cats"
enough!
I also contributed to the delays on this release because it took longer than I
expected to get the "PR machinery" started. We have a sort of system now,
though, and the next release should be easier.
HOWEVER, a release cycle of *less than 6 months* would kill the advocacy vols
if we wanted the same level of publicity.
I do support the idea of "dev" releases. For example, if there was a "dev"
release of PG+ARC as soon as Jan is done with it, I have one client would
would be willing to test it against a simulated production load on pretty
heavy-duty hardware.
(Oddly enough, my problem in doing more testing myself is external to
PostgreSQL; most of our apps are PHP apps and you can't compile PHP against
two different versions of PostgreSQL on the same server. Maybe with User
Mode Linux I'll be able to do more testing now.)
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco