On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 5:01 , Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Geoff Winkless <pgsqladmin@geoff.dj>
> wrote:
>> Wow! I never knew there were all these people out there who would
>> be rushing
>> to help test if only the PG developers released alpha versions.
>> It's funny
>> how they never used to do it when those alphas were done.
>
> That's probably overplaying your hand a little bit (and it sounds a
> bit catty, too). Some testing got done and it had some value. It
> just wasn't enough to make Peter feel like it was worthwhile. That
> doesn't mean that no testing got done and that it had no value, or
> that the same thing would happen this time. I'm as skeptical about
> this whole rush-out-an-alpha business as anyone, but I think that
> skepticism has to yield to contrary evidence, and people saying "I
> would test if..." is legitimate contrary evidence.
Agreed.
To get back to the point, I think the problem with original alphas was
that they were after CF snapshots, not something that represented the
final release.
I do think that proper alpha/beta release is signal for several
companies (I do know some that do testing once beta gets out) to do
testing as it does indeed say that we are releasing something that is
close in functionality to the final release.
Also the packages are really important, there are enough companies that
don't install development packages to servers at all so it's not just
compile and run for them, they have to move it over to other machines,
etc. We should be lowering the barrier to user based testing as much as
possible and doing alpha with packages is exactly how we do that.
IMHO the only real discussion here is if current 9.5 is ready for user
testing and FWIW I thin it is.
-- Petr Jelinek http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
