Re: [HACKERS] Development Plans - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Simon Riggs wrote:
> I'm giving a talk next week on PostgreSQL 8, so I would like some input
> from the community on a few issues, so that my answers are as close to
> majority opinion as possible.
>
> One of the most frequent set of questions I get asked is around the
> development vision and release strategy of PostgreSQL.
>
> - When is the next release due?
> - What will be in release 8.1?
> - What are you working towards? Performance? Stability? X?
>
> These are all good questions, you'll note. They mostly indicate that the
> person asking the question has already got the more basic messages, and
> are preparing themselves to fully accept PostgreSQL as the way forward
> *for them*.
>
> I think I've come to understand the answers to many of these questions,
> but these answers are not written down. When I do answer them, I try to
> make it clear that I present a personal opinion only - but that always
> gets strange looks. People really do not understand why there is no
> official answer, and take that as a black mark.
> Other projects such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenOffice have much of this
> type of information easily available - certainly commercial software
> vendors spend a good deal of time on providing this information.
> Could we find a way of expressing the project philosophy in writing, so
> I can convey that message out to the world, exactly as intended, without
> any Riggs filtering?

I have no idea how to predict what will be in 8.1.  I couldn't predict
what would be in 8.0 until just before feature freeze, so the idea that
we would have any clue about 8.1 is unrealistic.

How do other open source projects predict these things? The most visible
project I know that did that was Mozilla, and it was very unpredictive,
and they had a higher percentage of paid folks than we do.

--
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