Re: Autovacuum Integration Patch Take 5 - Mailing list pgsql-patches

Matthew, your reply was exactly the type of reply I would have made in
your situation.  Your arguments are clear and indisputable.

Due to the many large patches the we had to process during this release,
we serialized their review.  However, I made promises to developers that
their patches would get the same consideration if they were reviewed
early or late.  Obviously this wasn't true of your patch.  We found more
issues than we thought and didn't give you time to address them.
Frankly we are lucky autovacuum was the only item that didn't make it
because several features were in similar need of major work.  Of course
that is no consolation to you and people looking for autovacuum in 8.0.

Not sure what I can do about it at this point.  I am going to write up a
whole documentation section on 3rd party tools and interfaces and
pg_autovacuum would have a big mention there.

There is the issue of Win32 and the need for pg_autovacuum to start
easily.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>
> >You're headed in the right direction, but I'm afraid we're running out
> >of time.  The core committee has chewed this over and agreed that we
> >can't postpone beta for the amount of time we think it will take to make
> >this patch committable.  So we're going to hold it over for the 8.1
> >release cycle.
> >
> >I have to make a personal apology to you for the fact that things worked
> >out this way.  I really should have looked at your patch much earlier
> >and given you some feedback that might have allowed you to resolve the
> >issues in time.  I did not because (a) I felt that the other patches
> >I was working on were more important features (a judgment I still stand
> >by) and (b) I thought your patch was in good enough shape that we could
> >apply it with little effort.  That judgment was badly off, and again I
> >must apologize for it.  I hope you won't get discouraged, and will
> >continue to work on an integrated autovacuum for 8.1.
> >
> >
>
> ARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
> This is very frustrating.  I saw this coming weeks and weeks ago and
> tried to get people's attention so that this wouldn't happen.  Aside
> from my personal frustration, I will say that autovacuum is a high
> priority for lots of users of autovacuum and there are already lots of
> users looking forward to it being in 8.0.  FWIW, I tried to clean up as
> much stuff as I could the other night and submit and updated patch, I
> would guess that it wouldn't take you very long to clean up the shutdown
> issues.
>
> BTW, I choose to try to integrate it into the backend on the
> recomendation of several people on the hackers list despite my warnings
> that I would probably need help with the backend code issues.  I could
> have instead put my time towards an improved version in contrib, now the
> end-users will have to go another release cycle without any of the
> feature improvements I had hoped for.
>
> >FWIW, core has also agreed that we want to shoot for a much shorter
> >release cycle for 8.1 than we have had in the past couple of releases.
> >It seems likely that as the new 8.0 features are shaken out, 8.1 will
> >be mostly a mop-up development cycle, and that we will want to push it
> >out relatively soon (we're thinking of perhaps 3-4 months in
> >development, with a total release cycle of 6-7 months).
> >
> >
> >
> I think we have all heard this before....
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
>

--
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073