Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>> Why? A large portion of the input required to go from beta towards a
>> release is from actual users. To see when things break, what confuses
>> them and such.
> I have two concerns:
> 1. I'm concerned that once we release beta, any idea about reverting a
> feature or fixing something that is broken will get harder, because
> people will say "well, we can't do that after we've released a beta".
> I confess to particularly wanting a solution to the item listed as
> "custom-join has no way to construct Plan nodes of child Path nodes",
> the history of which I'll avoid recapitulating until I'm sure I can do
> it while maintaining my blood pressure at safe levels.
> 2. Also, if we're going to make significant multixact-related changes
> to 9.5 to try to improve reliability, as you proposed on the other
> thread, then it would be nice to do that before beta, so that it gets
> tested. Of course, someone is bound to point out that we could make
> those changes in time for beta2, and people could test that. But in
> practice I think that'll just mean that stuff is only out there for
> let's say 2 months before we put it in a major release, which ain't
> much.
I think your position is completely nuts. The GROUPING SETS code is
desperately in need of testing. The custom-plan code is desperately
in need of fixing and testing. The multixact code is desperately
in need of testing. The open-items list has several other problems
besides those. All of those problems are independent. If we insist
on tackling them serially rather than in parallel, 9.5 might not come
out till 2017.
I agree that we are not in a position to promise features won't change.
So let's call it an alpha not a beta --- but for heaven's sake let's
try to move forward on all these issues, not just some of them.
regards, tom lane
