Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Mon, 17 May 2004, Mike Mascari wrote:
> 
>>A quick google of "7.4 Win32 release" will reveal that the above was
>>precisely what was said about 7.4: it would be released to not hold
>>up important features like the IN optimization and a quick 7.5 would
>>have Win32 and PITR. It's almost as if a cron job reposts this
>>thread every 6 - 12 months. For those of us that are desirous of
>>PITR, it's a 6 month reposting that is becoming painful to read...
> 
> k, let's think this through ... 7.4 was released, what, 6 months ago?  And
> 6 months later, PITR still isn't ready?  Is there some logic here that if
> 7.4 wasn't released, PITR would have been done any sooner?

Not being the author, I don't know. And in the case of PITR, the 
pre-7.4 author is different than the post-7.4 author. However, if I 
was personally responsible for holding up the release of a project 
due to a feature that I had vowed to complete, I would feel morally 
compelled to get it done. If I had then asked for, and was granted, 
an extra 15-30 days I would feel even more personally responsible 
and under greater pressure.

If, however, the project made the release without waiting, I would 
feel simultaneously relieved and possibly a little bitter. Possibly 
a little bitter in that either what I was working on wasn't 
perceived as sufficiently valuable to hold up a release for 15-30 
days, or that my word regarding the completion status was 
insufficient for the project to trust me. Let me reiterate the words 
"possibly" and "little." But in open source projects, a developer 
willing to contribute hundreds, possibly thousands of hours of his 
own time is particularly invaluable.

I can tell you that, in economic models that have studied human 
behavior with respect to unemployment insurance, for example, the 
re-employment rates are clustered at the tails: when someone is 
first unemployed and when the insurance is about to expire. It's an 
inappropriate analogy because the project lives on from release to 
release, instead of having a drop-dead date at which point no future 
changes would be made ad infinitum, but it paints a useful picture. 
I'm willing to bet that CVS commit rates mirror the above behavior.

Unlike unemployment benefits, releasing the software without the 
feature essentially just extends the development period another 6 
months, the work will intensify at the new perceived tails, and the 
process repeated. There are probably econometric papers that model 
the software development release cycle that could give quantitative 
arguments. I'm not arguing I'm right and your wrong, btw. I'm just 
pointing out some of the possibilities. In fact, for one developer 
it might be the "code production maximizing condition" to give them 
another 6 months and for another, creating the pressure associated 
with a 15-30 day extension where the world is standing still 
awaiting their patch...

Mike Mascari