On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> What I was complaining about is new feature patches for 9.5 arriving
>> after the start of the last CF. There has to be some date after which
>> a patch is too late to be considered for a given release, or we will
>> never ship a release. We can argue about what that date is, and it
>> can be different for different people if we so choose, but at the end
>> of the day, you have to cut it off someplace, or you never get the
>> release out.
>
> Well, I'm going to push back on that concept a bit. I do not think the
> CF process is, or ever has been, meant to tell committers they can't work
> on things at times they find convenient. That would be holding back
> progress to little purpose. What the CF process is about is making sure
> that things don't slip through the cracks, and in particular that
> submissions from non-committers get due consideration on a reasonably
> timely basis.
I agree with all of that.
> We do have a process in which even committers have to think twice about
> whether it's appropriate to push something, but that's feature freeze
> during alpha/beta/RC testing, and we are still a long way away from that
> stage for 9.5.
My understanding has been that for the last 5 years, the feature
freeze deadline, for both committers and non-committers, is the
beginning of the last CF, and earlier for "major" patches, most of
which tend to come from committers. Now, I understand that we are
more free with making exceptions for committers, and there's some
justification for that, but, let's be honest, an awful lot of the
people submitting major patches at this point *are* committers, and
essentially all of those people take care to get their major patches
submitted before the last CF starts, and have for years, whether you
want to admit that or not. I think we'd making a huge mistake if we
choose to back away from that, and I think you'd be arguing the other
side of this question in a heartbeat if somebody who happened to have
a commit bit submitted something you thought was half-baked.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company