Re: 9.6 -> 10.0

On 05/09/2016 08:53 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 05/09/2016 08:39 AM, Devrim Gündüz wrote:
>
>> Eventually, before releasing 9.6beta1, to make the packagers lives
>> easier, I
>> want to push for a change again. Let's stop being conservative, and
>> mark this
>> release as 10.0.
>
> The argument boils down to this:

Thanks for summary, doing my best to take these arguments head-on.

>
> There is no technical reason to name it 10.0 so why would we?

Because there has never before been a "technical" reason for a major
version number, so why is that the criterion now?   People keep talking
about breaking the file format, but since nobody has plans to do that in
the next 2 releases, it's a stupid reason for waiting.

There are two solid reasons to call this release 10.0:

1. We've added parallel query, a feature which has been on the TODO list
for well over a decade.

2. We've got a greater-thank-average number of features which could
cause instability/corruption bugs, so users should treat this upgrade
with caution.

Also a third, weaker one:

3. pglogical will probably reach release quality before next year,
making this release the "hot upgrade" release.

> Because it grants a larger advocacy opportunity and shows the amount of
> effort that went into 9.6Devel/10.0.
>
> There is every advocacy reason to name it 10.0 so why wouldn't we?
>
> Because it will potentially cheapen the value of moving to 11.0 unless
> we are predictably conservative about our release versioning process.

We have always been overly conservative about major version numbers.
The result is having our users talk about "Postgres 9" like there's been
no significant changes since 9.0.  It makes it look like we're not
making progress, something which competing communities take advantage of
(such as MariaDB: if you think it's a coincidence they jumped their
version number to one higher than ours, think again).

Further, none of the "game-changer" features talked about for the next
release are high-certainty.  So there's a significant probability that
9.7 will still not be "good enough" to be 10.0, and we won't switch to
10.0 until we're forced to because of 9.9.  It's goofy, it's like
someone is charging us for version numbers.

I'm in favor of 10.0.  It's time.

--
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)