On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Dimitri Fontaine <dfontaine@hi-media.com> writes:
>> Goal being to continue being responsive to authors in a way that will
>> not compromise our stability, but if that means *all* qualified talents
>> of the community get assigned to release management team… I stop seeing
>> the point.
>
> There seems to be some weird notion abroad in this thread that the
> primary time sink during beta is unspecified low-skill "release
> management" tasks. There really isn't all that much of that.
I wasn't under that impression. I did have the impression that the
primary time sink was resolving "open items", which I think could have
been better organized last time around.
> What I find takes up a lot of time is post-commit patch review, fixing
> reported bugs, and documentation cleanup. Now we could doubtless find
> other people to do the purely copy-editing aspects of doc cleanup, like
> fixing less-than-stellar English, but what I'm really looking for is
> factually incorrect or obsolete statements. It takes someone who's
> pretty much familiar top-to-bottom with the whole product to do a decent
> job of spotting things that were true awhile ago but aren't any longer.
> We just don't have many people who (a) can and (b) will do that work.
Do you think I'd be qualified to help with any of this? (Feel free to
reply off-list, if that's more appropriate... or just let 'er rip.)
> What I think we really need for beta, and could reasonably hope to get,
> is a larger and better-organized beta testing effort. But we are not
> going to get that if people are thinking about new development and
> commit fests instead of testing what's already there.
We've had some interest in trying to organize that - from Josh Berkus,
I believe, among others. As for beta-testing myself, AFAIR, the most
commonly advocated strategy for beta testing is "run your application
on the beta and see if it goes boom". I don't really see how I'm
supposed to spend five months on that. I could do it, but if I poke
at it for a couple of days and nothing blows up, it probably isn't
going to blow up. What then?
...Robert