On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> We don't have a clear definition of what Beta means. For me, Beta has always
> meant "trial software, please test".
>
> I don't think anybody will say anything bad about us if we release a beta
> and then later pull some of the features because we are not confident with
> them when AFTER testing the feature is shown to be below our normal
> standard; that will bring us credit, I feel. It is extremely common in
> software development to defer some of the features if their goals aren't
> met, or to change APIs and interfaces based upon user feedback.
Yeah, but we usually haven't. Tom, for example, has previously not
wanted to even bump catversion after beta1, which rules out a huge
variety of possible fixes and interface changes. If we want to make a
policy decision to change our approach, we should be up-front about
that.
> None of this means I disagree with assessments of the current state of the
> software, I'm saying that we should simply follow the normal process and
> stick to the schedule we have previously agreed, for all of the reasons
> cited when we agreed it.
Well, to my way of looking at it, our feature freeze was later this
year than it has been in the past, so our beta will be later, too. If
we want to stick with the schedule, we have to do that throughout.
Our typical schedule has been a two-month final CommitFest starting on
January 15th. This year we had a three month final CommitFest
starting on February 15th. So we finished the last CommitFest two
months later than has been typical.
Typically our beta has been in early May, 1-2 months after the end of
the last CommitFest. If you add the same two months to that, you get
early July, which sounds reasonable, rather than early June, which
sounds rushed, especially since we have an urgent need to get minor
releases out the door to fix critical stability bugs right now, and
then we have PGCon, during which nobody's going to be looking at
anything.
It sounds to me like the original plan was to put out a beta in early
June, which would have been fine if we'd stuck to the traditional
2-month final CommitFest. But we didn't.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
