Re: advocating LTS release and feature-train release cycles

On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 12:59:14PM +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> I disagree. The fact that we have 1 release per year means there's one
> deadline, and if you miss it you have to wait another year for the feature
> to be available in official release. That's a lot of pressure and
> frustration for developers. With more frequent releases, this issue gets
> less serious. Of course, it's not a silver bullet (e.g. does not change
> review capacity).

But it's the second part of this that is the main issue.  For the
people who are driving features in postgres now are overwhelmingly the
most advanced users, who also want rock solid database reliability.

After all, the simple use cases (the ones that basically treat the
DBMS as an expensive version of a flat filesystem) have been solved
for many releases quite well in Postgres.  These are the cases that
people used to compare with MySQL, and MySQL isn't any better at them
any more than Postgres.  But Postgres isn't really any better at them
than MySQL, either, because the basic development model along those
lines is low sophistication and is automatically constrained by round
tripping between the application and the database.

Anyone who wants to scale for real understands that and has already
figured out the abstractions they need.  But those are also the people
with real data at stake, which is why they picked Postgres as opposed
to some eventually-consistent mostly-doesn't-lose-data distributed
NoSQL system.  The traditional Postgres promise that it never loses
your data is important to all those people too.

Yet they're pressing for hot new features because it's the nifty
database tricks you can do that allow you to continue to build
ever-larger database systems.  If the model switched to more frequent
"feature releases" with less frequent "LTS" releases for stability,
one of two things would happen:

    1.  There'd be pressure to get certain high-value features into
    the LTS releases.  This is in effect the exact issue there is now.

    2.  The people who really need high quality and advanced features
    would all track the latest release anyway, because their risk
    tolerance is actually higher than they think (or more likely,
    they're doing the risk calculations wrong).  The effect of this
    would be to put pressure on the intermediate releases for higher
    quality, which would result in neglect of the quality issues of
    the LTS anyway.

And on top of the above, you'd split the developer community between
those working on LTS and those not.  Given that the basic problem is
"not enough developers to get the quality quite right against the
desired features", I don't really see how it helps.

As nearly as I can tell, noting that I'm watching almost entirely from
the sidelines, what really happened in the case that has everyone
worried is that one highly-esteemed developer claimed something and
maybe should have relinquished sooner given his workload.  That
happens; nobody's perfect.  It's frustrating, but this is not the only
community to have had that issue (cf. Linux kernel, for an
approximately infinite series of examples of this).  I am not sure
that the answer to this is a rejigging of the basic development model.
Hard cases make bad law.

Best regards,

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@crankycanuck.ca