On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Ross J. Reedstrom <reedstrm@rice.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:16:45AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> > On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 2:43 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote:
>> >> I think to really address that problem, you need to think about shorter
>> >> release cycles overall, like every 6 months. Otherwise, the current 12
>> >> to 14 month horizon is just too long psychologically.
>>
>> > I agree. I am in favor of a shorter release cycle.
>>
>> I'm not. I don't think there is any demand among *users* (as opposed to
>> developers) for more than one major PG release a year. It's hard enough
>> to get people to migrate that often.
>
> In fact, I predict that the observed behavior would be for even more end
> users to start skipping releases. Some already do - it's common not to
> upgrade unless there's a feature you really need, but for those who do
> stay on the 'current' upgrade path, you'll lose some who can't afford to
> spend more than one integration-testing round a year.
Well, that aspect of the problem doesn't bother me, much. I don't
really care whether people upgrade to each new release the moment it
comes out anyway. It would require us to keep any
backward-compatibility hacks around for more releases, but we're
pretty good about that anyway. 8.3 broke the world, but the last few
releases have been pretty smooth for most people, I think.
Not to say that there aren't OTHER problems with the idea...
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company